Law Professor Nominated for Key Judgeship : Judiciary: President chooses William A. Fletcher of UC Berkeley for U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. His mother is on the same federal bench.

President Clinton on Wednesday nominated UC Berkeley law professor William A. Fletcher, his former Oxford University classmate and Northern California campaign co-director, for a position on the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

If confirmed by the U.S. Senate, Fletcher, 49, and his mother, Betty B. Fletcher, a 9th Circuit judge since 1979, would become the first mother-son combination to serve together on the federal bench in U.S. history.

“I’m deeply honored by the nomination and will try very hard to live up to the trust the President has placed in me,” the professor said. He declined further comment until his confirmation hearing.

For her part, Judge Fletcher said she and her husband, law professor Robert Fletcher, were “full of pride” about the nomination. “There are lots of sons, but not very many mothers,” she said when asked about the prospect of being part of the first mother-son combo on the federal bench.

Fletcher was unanimously given the American Bar Assn.’s highest rating--well-qualified--by a national screening committee. “I interviewed a hundred people, and I did not hear one negative comment,” said Los Angeles attorney Richard M. Macias, the committee member who did the detailed research on Fletcher.

The nomination was praised by a broad range of judges, lawyers and law professors, but it raised the eyebrows of a conservative judicial watchdog group in Washington.

“Willy Fletcher is a person of keen intellect and the highest integrity,” said Alan D. Bersin, the U.S. attorney in San Diego, who was a Rhodes scholar at England’s Oxford University with Clinton and Fletcher. “I expect that he will make a great contribution to the jurisprudence of the 9th Circuit.”

Fletcher’s nomination also was backed by University of Texas law professor Charles Alan Wright, one of the nation’s leading conservative constitutional scholars, who represented President Richard M. Nixon in his attempts to avoid turning over White House tapes sought by special prosecutor Leon Jaworski during his investigation of the Watergate break-in.

Wright recently wrote to White House Counsel Abner Mikva, saying that Fletcher would make “an outstanding contribution to the bench” if he garnered a 9th Circuit appointment.

While noting that he did not always agree with Fletcher’s academic publications, Wright wrote that the nominee’s work “is always scholarship of the highest order, with comprehensive research, thoughtful and provocative analysis and scrupulous fairness to every side of an issue rather than seeking to prove a preconceived conclusion.”

Herma Hill Kay, dean of UC Berkeley’s Boalt Hall School of Law, also recommended Fletcher to Mikva.

“The qualities that make Willy Fletcher such an outstanding teacher and scholar will also produce high marks for him as an appellate judge,” Kay wrote to Mikva. “He listens carefully and with respect to his students and his colleagues; he states his own views modestly and after much reflection. He is a scholar who writes with precision and flair.”

In academic circles, Fletcher is best known for law review articles on significant but complicated topics such as standing to sue, sovereign immunity and other aspects of federal civil procedure.

“I don’t think any of his writings are likely to be politically controversial or the cause of any problems in the confirmation process,” said USC law professor Erwin Chemerinsky, who reviewed Fletcher’s work while researching a book on federal jurisdiction. “His scholarship is thorough, well written and not polemical.”

Chemerinsky said Fletcher’s writings support greater access to the federal courts, a liberal position, but “not a hot button issue like affirmative action. It’s hard to see what the trigger would be to provoke the right wing to go after him.”

Still, Bruce Fein, a conservative constitutional scholar and a former Justice Department official in the Reagan Administration, said “someone who is a professor from Berkeley may have a tough time getting through a Senate Judiciary Committee headed by Orrin Hatch (R-Utah).”

Fein said he expected that Hatch and other committee members would ask Fletcher “about affirmative action, quotas, preferences” and other controversial issues even though Fletcher has not written about those topics.

Tom Jipping of the conservative Free Congress Foundation said the group was just beginning to review Fletcher’s articles, but “I’m quite confident his substantive record will reveal a liberal activist judicial philosophy which characterizes many of Clinton’s picks.”

Fletcher graduated with honors from Harvard before attending Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. He then served two years in the U.S. Navy before attending Yale Law School, where he graduated with honors. He later worked as a law clerk to federal District Court Judge Stanley Weigel in San Francisco and U.S. Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan Jr., before joining the Boalt faculty in 1977. He has been at Boalt Hall since then, other than periods spent as a visiting professor at other law schools and taking a leave in the fall of 1992 to work on Clinton’s presidential campaign.