Jacquelyn Austin confirmed by U.S. Senate. She will be SC’s newest federal judge

Jacquelyn Austin, a federal magistrate judge in Greenville, was confirmed Wednesday to a lifetime judge’s post by the U.S. Senate.

The Senate vote was 80-17.

Austin will be based primarily in Greenville, sources familiar with South Carolina’s federal judiciary said. Federal judges make $243,000 a year.

The next step in Austin’s becoming a judge is getting her commission from President Joe Biden and then to be sworn in, said Carl Tobias, a University of Richmond law school professor who tracks the federal judiciary.

“It is one of the strongest votes that any of the president’s (judicial) nominees have gotten,” Tobias said Wednesday after the vote.

Not only did Austin have excellent credentials, Tobias said, but she also had the enthusiastic support of U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., the Judiciary Committee’s top ranking minority member.

“She’ll be a great judge, she’s very impressive,” Tobias said.

Austin, whose age is around 57, is the third South Carolina judge of color to be nominated by President Joe Biden to the federal bench.

One of Biden’s picks, Michelle Childs, a former federal trial judge in Columbia, was elevated to the federal District of Columbia Court of Appeals. Another, DeAndrea Benjamin, was a South Carolina state judge based in Columbia before she became a judge on the U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond.

In 2020, while running for president, Biden pledged to appoint more Blacks and other minorities to the federal bench.

As of Nov. 5, Biden had appointed 145 judges to the three main levels of the federal judicial system: the district courts, the appeals courts and the U.S. Supreme Court. Women accounted for about 66% of those judges, according to the Pew Research Center.

Austin will replace the judgeship vacated by Childs when she went to the District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals.

Austin, a Sumter native, has been a magistrate judge since 2011. Before, she was a business litigation lawyer with Womble Carlyle in Greenville. She is a 1996 graduate of the University of South Carolina law school.

South Carolina has nine active federal judges and four federal judges on senior status, meaning they have a reduced workload.

In the hierarchy of federal courts, magistrate judges are one step below district trial judges.

Magistrate judges are selected by the federal judges in a district and usually handle a variety of pretrial motions in civil and criminal cases and can issue search warrants. District judges conduct trials in civil and criminal cases.