Janice Rogers Brown

Janice Rogers Brown (born May 11, 1949) is an American jurist. She served as a United States circuit judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit from 2005 to 2017 and before that, Associate Justice of the California Supreme Court from 1996 to 2005. She is a member of the Federalist Society and frequently features at events hosted by the organization. Her 2003 nomination by George W. Bush to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit was opposed by civil rights groups and stalled for nearly two years by Democratic senators who saw her as an extreme "conservative judicial activist.” She was eventually re-nominated and confirmed in 2005. The following month, after Justice Sandra Day O'Connor retired from the United States Supreme Court, Brown was reportedly considered as a potential nominee to replace O'Connor. Brown was ultimately not nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court. Early life and education Brown was born Janice Olivia Allen in Greenville, Alabama, in 1949. Her father was a World War II veteran who sharecropped a leased 158-acre plot before reenlisting. After her parents separated, she was raised primarily by her paternal grandmother until, as a teenager, she moved to Sacramento, California, with her mother who was a nurse. When her mother remarried, she took the name Rogers. Brown earned a B.A. from California State University, Sacramento, in 1974 while working as a single mother at the Department of Corrections where she met her first husband, Allen E. Brown Sr., who was an administrator there. She earned a J.D. from UCLA in 1977. She received a Master of Laws degree from the University of Virginia School of Law in 2004.