William Orrick III

His father, William H. Orrick Jr. (1915–2003), was a United States District Judge for the Northern District of California and served as Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Division in the John F. Kennedy administration.

William Horsley Orrick III (born May 15, 1953) is an American lawyer who serves as a senior United States district judge of the United States District Court for the Northern District of California.

He had a long career as a lawyer in private practice in San Francisco, and served as a Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Civil Division of the United States Department of Justice during the Obama administration.

Orrick was born in San Francisco on May 15, 1953.

Orrick received his Bachelor of Arts, cum laude, from Yale University in 1976.

From 1977 to 1979 he was a student attorney for the Boston College Legal Assistance Bureau.

He received his Juris Doctor, cum laude, from Boston College Law School in 1979.

After graduating, Orrick worked from 1979 to 1984 at the Georgia Legal Services Program in Savannah, providing legal aid services to low-income Georgians.

Upon returning to San Francisco, he chose to join William Coblentz's Coblentz, Patch, Duffy & Bass LLP, rather than the law firm co-founded by his grandfather William Orrick Sr., Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe.

Orrick practiced at the Coblentz firm for about 25 years, from 1984 to 2009.

He joined as an associate in 1984 and was promoted to partner in 1988.

His mother, Marion Naffziger Orrick (d. 1995), was active in San Francisco civic life.

Orrick's uncle, Andrew Downey Orrick, was acting chairman of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in San Francisco.

Orrick is the judge assigned to oversee the reforms of the Oakland Police Department mandated by the department's 2003 settlement of Allen v. City of Oakland, a long-running case involving systemic police misconduct.

In hearings, Orrick has pushed the department to make more progress on reforms.

Robert Warshaw is the court-appointed monitor of the Oakland Police Department reforms.

Orrick then served in the Civil Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, first as counselor (June 2009 – June 2010) and then as deputy assistant attorney general (June 2010 – 2013), heading the Office of Immigration Litigation.

Orrick returned to Coblentz, Patch, Duffy & Bass for ten months while his nomination to the district court was pending in the Senate.

On June 11, 2012, President Barack Obama nominated Orrick to be a United States district judge of the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, to the seat vacated by Judge Charles Breyer, who assumed senior status on December 31, 2011.

The American Bar Association's Standing Committee on the Federal Judiciary, which rates the qualifications of federal judicial nominees, unanimously rated Orrick "well qualified" for the judgeship (the committee's highest rating).

The Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on Orrick's nomination on July 11, 2012.

His nomination was reported out of committee on August 2, 2012, by a 12–6 vote.

However, his nomination was blocked by Senate Republicans, and on January 2, 2013, his nomination was returned to the President, due to the adjournment sine die of the Senate at the end of the 112th Congress.

The next day, January 3, 2013, he was renominated to the same office.

His nomination was reported by the Senate Judiciary Committee on February 28, 2013, by a 11–7 vote.

The U.S. Senate confirmed his nomination on May 15, 2013, by a 56–41 vote, with three senators not voting.

The confirmation vote was mostly on party lines, with all Democrats and three Republican Senators (Jeff Flake, Susan Collins, and Lisa Murkowski) voting to confirm Orrick and all other Republicans voting against confirmation.

He received his commission the following day.

He assumed senior status on May 17, 2023.

As a federal judge, Orrick established chambers in the Phillip Burton Federal Building in San Francisco.

In 2014, Orrick upheld California state legislation that banned the possession and sale of shark fin, a prohibition aimed at stopping the practice of shark finning.

Orrick rejected the claim of a group of San Francisco Bay Area Chinese American businesses and shark fin suppliers that the ban was unconstitutionally discriminatory.

Orrick wrote that although "people of Chinese origin or culture undoubtedly overwhelmingly comprise the market for shark fin,... a law is not unconstitutional simply because it has a racially disparate impact."

Orrick's dismissal of the case was affirmed on appeal.

In 2015, Orrick denied a motion filed by Pacific Gas and Electric Co. (PG&E) to dismiss the case against it arising from pollution discharges into San Francisco Bay by PG&E's manufactured fuel gas (oil and coal) power plants decades earlier.

Orrick held that PG&E's refusal to test for groundwater contamination at the former plants gave rise to a continuing "imminent and substantial endangerment" to the environment and human health, particularly in the Marina District and Fisherman's Wharf neighborhoods.

In 2015, Orrick issued a temporary restraining order (TRO) blocking the Center for Medical Progress (CMP), an anti-abortion group, from releasing secretly recorded videos of the National Abortion Federation (NAF).

In 2018, Orrick approved a settlement of the case, in which PG&E agreed to monitor and potentially clean up pollution from its old sites and agreed to make payments to a conservation organization and habitat restoration efforts.

In March 2019, Orrick appointed an attorney to serve as an independent investigator to probe the killing of a homeless man with mental health problems who was shot by Oakland police in 2018.

At an August 2019 court conference, Orrick criticized the city for not making sufficient progress in eliminating racial disparities in policing.