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Goodwin Liu ’98JDWednesday, a group of liberal law professors delivered a letter urging President Barack Obama to move more aggressively in appointing “a new generation of jurists.” That very day, Obama nominated Goodwin Liu ’98JD for a seat on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. At age 39, Liu is indeed part of a new generation. He’s also a liberal law professor and associate dean of the Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California at Berkeley. A former Rhodes scholar who clerked for Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the US Supreme Court, Liu is perhaps best known for his criticism of Samuel Alito ’75JD—co-authoring a report that accused Alito [PDF] of “diluting norms of basic fairness” in death penalty cases, and then testifying against Alito’s elevation to the Supreme Court. One conservative blog dubbed Liu an “Anti-Alito Left-Winger,” while the L.A. Weekly’s Queer Town blog hailed him as a “Prop 8 Foe” who publicly opposed California’s anti-gay-marriage law. Liu has at least one booster on the right, though: Clint Bolick—who famously tagged an earlier Yale Law grad and federal nominee as a “quota queen”—wrote to Obama last month supporting the expected nomination. “I find Prof. Liu to exhibit fresh, independent thinking and intellectual honesty,” Bolick wrote. 
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