Boxer Recommends 2 L.A. Lawyers for U.S. Judgeships

Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) announced Tuesday that she has recommended two prominent Los Angeles public interest lawyers to President Clinton for federal trial judgeships here.

Boxer urged the president to nominate Dolly M. Gee, a labor lawyer, and Fredric D. Woocher, who successfully represented Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-Garden Grove) in the House of Representatives when incumbent Robert Dornan challenged her narrow victory over him in 1996.

Gee, 39, was born in Hawthorne, graduated Phi Beta Kappa from UCLA, and after concluding her studies at the UCLA Law School served as a law clerk for U.S. District Judge Milton Schwartz in Sacramento. Boxer said Gee then joined the Los Angeles labor law firm of Schwartz, Steinsapir, Dohrmann & Sommers.

Boxer said Gee decided to represent workers because of the conditions she witnessed in the garment industry, where her mother, a Chinese immigrant, toiled as a seamstress. If confirmed, Gee would be the first Chinese American woman to serve on the federal bench.

Gee, who is fluent in Cantonese, co-founded the Asian Pacific American Bar Assn. of Los Angeles and the Multicultural Bar Alliance. She is the past president of the Southern California Chinese Lawyers Assn. and is a member of the California Bar Assn. commission that evaluates prospective nominees for state court judgeships.

Boxer praised Gee as “a first-rate attorney” whose story “of hard work and personal triumph are proof of the power of the American dream.”

Boxer hailed Woocher as “a remarkably talented attorney, with a true passion for the law and its proper role in American society.”

Wocher was born in New York in 1951. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Yale College in 1972, then obtained a PhD in cognitive psychology and a law degree from Stanford University. He served as president of the Stanford Law Review and then clerked for federal appellate Judge David Bazelon in Washington and later for Supreme Court Justice William Brennan.

After working as an assistant to Secretary of Defense Harold Brown, Woocher moved to Los Angeles and spent seven years at the Center for Law in the Public Interest. At the center he won a case in the U.S. Supreme Court that held that regulations prohibiting recipients of federal funds from editorializing violated the 1st Amendment.

In 1988, he became a special counsel to California Atty. Gen. John K. Van de Kamp. In 1990, Woocher formed his own firm in Santa Monica, where he has been involved in a broad range of civil litigation, including successfully representing anti-cigarette activists who sued the state over Gov. Pete Wilson’s transfer of tobacco tax money from anti-smoking advertisements to other programs.