Christine Arguello Is The Latest Latina To Be Dangled In Front Of You For U.S. Supreme Court

Christine Arguello, a federal judge in Colorado, says she was approached by President Obama’s people about the recent opening on the U.S. Supreme Court, but who is this fine piece of Latina justice? 

Christine Arguello is a 53 year-old Mexican-American born in 1955 in Southern Colorado to a railroad worker dad who housed his family for a time in a boxcar. Arguello earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Colorado in 1977 — becoming the first member of her family to graduate college. It was there she met her husband Ron with whom she would later have four kids.

Arguello went on to earn a law degree from Harvard Law School in 1980, six years after they had admitted their first Chicana.

Arguello worked in private practice from 1980 to 1985 during which time she became the first Hispanic woman to become a partner at a major Colorado law firm.

From 1991 to 1998, Arguello began her academic teaching career–which was a marriage of her first love, teaching, and her second passion, law– at the University of Kansas Law School. She was all set to transfer to the University of Colorado in 1998 as a full professor when she changed her mind and decided, instead, to take a job at the Attorney General’s office as a Deputy AG under then Colorado AG Ken Salazar. This would prove to be a wise career move.

President Clinton nominated Arguello to a recently vacated seat on the Tenth Circuit in July of 2000, but because it was so late in an election year, she got no cases assigned to her. When George Bush gained control of that appointment the following year, he decided not to renew her nomination. At which point Arguello joined the firm of Davis, Graham & Stubbs in Denver.

In January of 2008 Arguello’s name made it onto a list of recommendations by both Colorado senators–one of whom was her old boss Ken Salazar–for the president to consider nominating to three vacant U.S. District Court judgeships. After a series of hoops, she was nominated and inducted in December of that year. During her investiture speech, she had this to say:

Words cannot express the emotions I am feeling today as I consider the responsibility that has been entrusted to me by this appointment. Perhaps this is because in my heart, today is really yesterday – a day more than 40 years ago when, as a 13-year-old, I picked up a magazine in the library and found myself entranced by the world of the law, and with the prospect that I could become a lawyer – an advocate for those who could not advocate for themselves.

Judge set for Supreme courtship [Denver Post]
Remarks by Christine M. Arguello Investiture for United States District Judge for the District of Colorado December 5, 2008 [CHBA]