Jon S. Tigar

Jon Tigar
Judge of the United States District Court for the Northern District of California
Incumbent
Assumed office January 18, 2013
Appointed by	Barack Obama
Preceded by	Saundra Brown Armstrong
Personal details
Born	(1962-10-08) October 8, 1962 (age 59) London, United Kingdom
Education	Williams College (BA) University of California, Berkeley (JD)

Jon Steven Tigar (born October 8, 1962) is a United States District Judge of the United States District Court for the Northern District of California.

Early life and education[]

Tigar was born in London, England in 1962.^[1] Tigar earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in English and Economics in 1984 from Williams College and a Juris Doctor degree in 1989 from UC Berkeley School of Law.^[2] He graduated Order of the Coif,^[1] was an Articles Editor of the California Law Review, and served as a Research Assistant to Professor Melvin Eisenberg. In 1989, Tigar served as a law clerk for United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit Judge Robert Smith Vance.^[2][3] He was clerking for Judge Vance when the judge was killed by a mail bomb sent to his home.^[4]

Professional career[]

From 1990 until 1992, Tigar served as a litigation associate for the law firm Morrison & Foerster. He then served as a public defender in San Francisco from 1993 until 1994^[2] Tigar practiced complex commercial litigation at the law firm Keker & Van Nest from 1994 until 2002.^[2] From 2002 to 2013, Tigar served as a judge on the Alameda County Superior Court.^[2]

Tigar is a member of the American Law Institute, for which he served as an Adviser to the Restatement (Third) of Torts: Liability for Economic Loss and now serves in the same capacity on the forthcoming Restatement (Third) of Torts: Defamation and Privacy.^[3][5] Tigar has taught Pretrial Litigation at UC Berkeley's School of Law. He has previously served as a member of California's Judicial Council Advisory Committee on Civil Jury Instructions and the Ninth Circuit's Jury Instructions Committee. From 2016-2019, he was the Judicial Representative to the Section of Antitrust Law of the American Bar Association. He is a Fellow of the American Bar Foundation.

Federal judicial service[]

On June 11, 2012, President Barack Obama nominated Tigar to be a judge on the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, taking the seat vacated by Judge Saundra Brown Armstrong, who took senior status on March 23, 2012.^[2] The United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary held a hearing on his nomination on July 11, 2012, and reported his nomination to the floor on August 2. The Senate confirmed his nomination by unanimous consent on December 21, 2012, and he received his commission on January 18, 2013.^[3]

Notable decisions[]

On April 2, 2015, Tigar ordered the California Department of Corrections ("CDCR") to provide gender reassignment surgery to a transgender inmate, finding that such surgery was the only adequate medical treatment for her gender dysphoria.^[6]

Since August 2017, Tigar has presided over Plata v. Newsom, a case concerning the constitutional adequacy of medical care in the California state prison system. On September 27, 2021, Tigar ordered that all CDCR staff, including medical and custody staff, be vaccinated against COVID-19, subject to medical and religious exemption.^[7] Tigar found that because the undisputed evidence showed that staff were the means for COVID to enter the prisons, allowing prison employees to remain unvaccinated violated incarcerated persons' Eighth Amendment constitutional rights. On November 29, 2021, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals blocked Tigar's order pending appeal.^[8]

On October 4, 2017, in the In re Wells Fargo & Company Shareholder Derivative Litigation, Tigar allowed a shareholder lawsuit to proceed against Wells Fargo's directors, finding that it was plausible that they had "consciously disregarded their fiduciary duties despite knowledge regarding [Wells Fargo's] widespread illegal account-creation activities."^[9] Writing for The New York Times, financial writer Gretchen Morgenson called the ruling "unusual and welcome" and said it would "resonate among corporate directors."^[10]

On November 19, 2018, Tigar issued a nationwide injunction barring the Trump administration from enforcing a rule that would deny asylum to anyone who entered the United States somewhere other than at a designated port of entry.^[11] Complaining about the ruling, President Trump characterized Tigar as an "Obama judge," prompting Chief Justice John Roberts to defend judicial independence by stating, "We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges. What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them. That independent judiciary is something we should all be thankful for."^[12] Tigar's injunction was upheld by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals,^[13][14] and the Supreme Court allowed the injunction to remain in place pending appeal.^[15] On February 2, 2021, President Biden signed Executive Order 14010 revoking Proclamation 9880 of May 9, 2019 (Addressing Mass Migration Through the Southern Border of the United States),^[16] thereby abrogating the rule limiting asylum claims.

On July 24, 2019, Tigar issued a nationwide injunction that barred the Trump administration from denying asylum to persons who crossed through but did not apply for asylum in a third country.^[17] In August, the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit found the administration's asylum policy "likely violated federal regulatory law" but narrowed Tigar's injunction to apply only within the Ninth Circuit.^[18] On September 9, 2019, Tigar reinstated the nationwide scope of the injunction.^[19] The Supreme Court stayed both orders on September 11, 2019 without addressing the legality of the administration's asylum policy.^[20] On July 6, 2020, the Ninth Circuit affirmed the injunction blocking the third country asylum bar and upheld the nationwide scope of the injunction.

On November, 2020, Tigar issued an order enjoining the California Department of Motor Vehicles from enforcing a ban on personalized license plate configurations it found “offensive to good taste and decency” on the grounds that the regulation violated the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.^[21]   Tigar wrote that the DMV’s “good taste and decency” standard created “a facial distinction between societally favored and disfavored ideas” and that “the public expression of ideas may not be prohibited merely because the ideas are themselves offensive to some of their hearers.”^[22]

Community involvement[]

Tigar serves on the board of SF Camerawork, a San Francisco non-profit dedicated to the support of emerging photographers and new ideas in and approaches to photography.^[23]

References[]

External links[]

• Jon S. Tigar at the Biographical Directory of Federal Judges, a public domain publication of the Federal Judicial Center.
• Jon S. Tigar at Ballotpedia