U.S. Circuit Judge James Wynn has decided to step down from active service on the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, opening a fourth seat for President Joe Biden to fill on the Richmond, Virginia-based federal appeals court.
The decision by Wynn, an appointee of Democratic former President Barack Obama, to take senior status was disclosed by the federal judiciary on Tuesday. The exact date he will do so is to be determined.
Senior status is a form of semi-retirement for judges over the age of 65 who have completed at least 15 years on the federal bench. Presidents may name new full-time judges to fill those judges' seats.
Wynn, 69, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The new vacancy gives Biden an opportunity to strengthen a liberal majority on a court that hears appeals from Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia and West Virginia.
The court currently has eight active judges appointed by Democratic presidents, including Wynn and Biden's two confirmed appointees, U.S. Circuit Judges Toby Heytens and DeAndrea Benjamin.
Six active 4th Circuit judges were appointed by Republican presidents. Biden is seeking to fill another vacancy with Nicole Berner, the general counsel of the Service Employees International Union. Her nomination is pending in the Senate.
Wynn served on the North Carolina Court of Appeals and the state's Supreme Court from 1990 to 2010, when the U.S. Senate confirmed him to a seat on the 4th Circuit.
Wynn, who is Black, had previously been nominated in 1999 to the court by Democratic former President Bill Clinton, who had hoped to diversify a court that had at that point never had a judge who was a person of color.
But then-North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms, a Republican, declined to return a so-called "blue slip" that would allow Wynn's nomination to proceed, and the seat remained vacant until Wynn's ultimate 2010 confirmation.
His notable decisions include a majority opinion in 2018 for a three-judge district court panel, on which he was sitting by designation, that struck down North Carolina's Republican-drawn congressional map as an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander that violated the U.S. Constitution's First and Fourteenth Amendments.
The conservative-majority U.S. Supreme Court reversed that decision in 2019 in Rucho v. Common Cause, holding for the first time that federal judges do not have the authority to curb partisan gerrymandering.
Wynn has been publicly critical of that decision, describing the Supreme Court's ruling in a lecture at New York University School of Law in 2020 as a form of "judicial activism."
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