Workaholic US District Judge in Fresno, Cal., to Leave Bench After 20 Years for Private Law Practice
Citing family obligations and excessive caseloads, a longtime federal district judge in Fresno, Cal., announced yesterday that he will step down from the bench at the end of the month to establish a private law practice.
Senior Judge Oliver Wanger, 70, will become the lead name partner in Fresno’s nine-attorney firm Jones Helsley, according to the Business Journal and the Fresno Bee.
A former prosecutor, he was a partner with McCormick Barstow Wayne Sheppard Wayte & Carruth before he was nominated to the federal bench in 1991. That was where he met and mentored associate Tim Jones, who is now a Jones Helsley partner, the Business Journal recounts.
Wanger, who also plans to teach at San Joaquin College of Law, which he helped found, expects to grow the Jones Helsley firm’s practice. It will expand its focus “in the areas of water law, environmental law, tort litigation, class action work and related consumer class action law suits,” he says, “so it will be, quite frankly, work that hasn’t ordinarily been done here.”
His retirement will exacerbate a critical shortage of judges in the Eastern District of California, where the caseload for those on the bench is already around triple the national average, the Bee says, noting that Wanger, because he is a senior judge, won’t be replaced.
“The already-strained workload of our court has now become impossible in light of Judge Wanger’s announcement to leave our bench,” U.S. District Judge Lawrence J. O’Neill told the newspaper in an email.
Calling Wanger a notorious workaholic, another Fresno Bee article notes that he didn’t reduce his caseload when he took senior status five years ago, in order to create a judicial vacancy that would help alleviate the overload on his colleagues.
“It’s a huge loss of institutional knowledge–and also the loss of his work ethic,” says defense attorney Carl Faller, a former federal prosecutor. “I think it will be very tough on the judges that remain to pick up the slack for someone who has been a massive part of that bench for so many years.”
