Official biography from the CA Court of Appeal website:
Administrative Presiding Justice Judith McConnell was appointed to the Court of Appeal, Fourth Appellate District, Division One in August 2001, and took office upon her confirmation October 3, 2001. On September 25, 2003, she was confirmed as Presiding Justice of the court. On September 29, 2003, she was appointed by the Chief Justice as Administrative Presiding Justice of the Fourth Appellate District. She served for 23 years as a trial judge in San Diego. Her colleagues on the Superior Court twice elected her Presiding Judge. She also served as Presiding Judge of the Juvenile Court and Supervising Judge of the family, appellate, and civil law and motion departments during her tenure on the Superior Court.
During Justice McConnell's judicial career, she has worked to improve the court system through better case management and to make the courts more accessible to the public. Justice McConnell served on the California Judicial Council and the Commission on Judicial Performance, the judicial disciplinary agency. She was a member of the Blue Ribbon Task Force on Jury System Improvement, the Commission on the Future of the Courts, and the Advisory Committee on Gender Bias in the Courts, a recipient of the 2001 Judicial Council Jurist of the Year Award and, in 1999, the first recipient of the Benjamin Aranda Access to Justice Award presented jointly by the Judicial Council, the California Judges Association, and the State Bar of California. In 2019, she received the American Bar Association's Margaret Brent Women Lawyers of Achievement Award. She was a founder and first president of Lawyers Club of San Diego and founder and president of the National Association of Women Judges and has worked to eliminate all forms of bias in the courts.
