Two men nominated by President Barack Obama to be federal judges in the San Francisco-based Northern District of California have won the approval of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee.

The nominations of Richard Seeborg, 52, of Palo Alto, and Edward Chen, 56, of San Francisco, will now go to the full Senate for confirmation.

The nominations were approved by the Judiciary Committee on Thursday.

If confirmed by the full Senate, Chen will become the first Asian-American federal trial judge in San Francisco.

He and Seeborg were nominated by Obama in August for the lifetime appointments as district judges.

Both men are currently serving as U.S. magistrate judges, Chen in San Francisco and Seeborg in San Jose. If approved, Chen would sit on the federal bench in San Francisco and Seeborg would sit either there or on the federal bench in San Jose.

The nominations were recommended by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who is a member of the Judiciary Committee.

Feinstein said Thursday that Chen, Seeborg and two other nominees approved for the federal court in Los Angeles are highly qualified and said, "I hope that the Senate will move expeditiously to confirm them."

Chen and Seeborg both became magistrate judges in 2001. Seeborg was previously a member of the law firm of Morrison and Foerster in San Francisco and Palo Alto and a federal prosecutor in San Jose.

Seeborg was named magistrate judge for the U.S. District Court on Feb. 9, 2001. He received his B.A. degree, summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, from Yale College in 1978. Upon graduating from Columbia University School of Law in 1981, where he was a Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar, Seeborg served in 1981-82 as a law clerk to U.S. District Judge John H. Pratt in Washington, D.C.

In 1982, he joined Morrison & Foerster's San Francisco office in the litigation department, and became a partner in 1987. From 1991 to 1998, Mr. Seeborg served as an Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of California in San Jose. He re-joined Morrison & Foerster in March 1998, where he resumed a litigation practice in securities, intellectual property and general commercial matters.

Chen previously worked for the American Civil Liberties Union for six years and for a private law firm for three years.

Federal district judges preside over civil cases and criminal felony cases. Magistrate judges, who do not have lifetime tenure, conduct most preliminary proceedings in criminal cases and preside over misdemeanor trials and some civil trials.

— Bay City News Service