Vince Chhabria

Chhabria was born in 1969 in San Francisco, California to an Indian father from Mumbai [1] and a Canadian mother, born in Quebec.[2] He received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1991 from the University of California, Santa Cruz. He received a Juris Doctor in 1998 from the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, graduating Order of the Coif. He served as a law clerk to Judge Charles R. Breyer of the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, from 1998 to 1999. He clerked for Judge James R. Browning of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, from 1999 to 2000. In 2001, he worked as an associate at the law firm of Keker & Van Nest, LLP. From 2001 to 2002, he clerked for Justice Stephen G. Breyer of the United States Supreme Court. From 2002 to 2004, he worked as an associate at the law firm of Covington & Burling, LLP. From 2005 to 2013, he served in the San Francisco City Attorney's Office, finally as Deputy City Attorney for Government Litigation and as the Co-Chief of Appellate Litigation.[3][4]

Vince Chhabria taking his seat on the bench

District Judge Vince Chhabria receives the oath of office from Circuit Judge Gregg Costa of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit (June 26, 2014)

On July 25, 2013, President Obama nominated Chhabria to serve as a United States District Judge of the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, to the seat vacated by Judge Susan Illston, who took senior status on July 1, 2013.[3] He was reported out of the United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary on January 16, 2014. On March 5, 2014, the motion to invoke cloture on his nomination was agreed to by a vote of 57–43. His nomination was confirmed later that day by a vote of 58–41. He received his judicial commission on March 7, 2014.[4]

One notable ruling by Chhabria was in the case of IMDb.com, Inc. v. Becerra, in which the website IMDb sued parties including California Attorney General Xavier Becerra and the Screen Actors Guild, seeking to counter a California law that barred IMDb from posting the birth dates of actors. Chhabria ruled that the California law was unconstitutional under the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.[5]

On October 3, 2016, the U.S. Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation appointed Chhabria to preside over the coordinated and consolidated pretrial proceedings for all product liability lawsuits filed against Monsanto in the federal court system, over failure to warn consumers and regulators that the glyphosate-based herbicide can cause non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.[6]

• Vince Chhabria at the Biographical Directory of Federal Judges, a public domain publication of the Federal Judicial Center.
• Vince Girdhari Chhabria at Ballotpedia