President Biden Nominates Port Authority General Counsel and State Superior Court Judge to the United States District Court for the District of New Jersey

January 9, 2023

Source: New Jersey Federal Practice Alert

On December 21, 2022, President Biden nominated Port Authority General Counsel Michael Farbiarz and State Superior Court Judge Robert Kirsch to the District Court for the District of New Jersey.  Both Mr. Farbiarz and Judge Kirsch were then part of a package of 25 judicial nominations President Biden sent back to the Senate on January 3, 2023, the next step in the confirmation process for nominees who did not receive votes before the end of 2022:

• Michael Farbiarz: In 2016, Michael Farbiarz joined the Port Authority as General Counsel.  From January 2020 to August 2021, he served as Acting Inspector General.
  
  From 2014-2016, Mr. Farbiarz was a Senior Fellow at NYU School of Law.  Prior to that, he served as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of New York for more than a decade, and was a lead prosecutor in important counterterrorism and counterintelligence cases.  Mr. Farbiarz was also a litigator in private practice with David Polk & Wardell in New York, and he served as the law clerk to U.S. District Court Judge Michael Mukasey in the Southern District of New York, and to Judge José Cabranes of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.
  
  Mr. Farbiarz is a graduate of Yale Law School and Harvard University and was a Fiske Scholar at Cambridge University.
  
  
• Robert Kirsch. Judge Robert Kirsch was appointed to the Superior Court of New Jersey in 2010 by former Governor Jon Corzine.  Since 2010, he has served as a Superior Court Judge in Union County.  He has served in both the Family and Civil Divisions, and has been assigned to the Criminal Division since 2016.
  
  Prior to his appointment to the State Court bench, Judge Kirsch was an assistant U.S. Attorney based in Newark in the securities and health care fraud unit, where he prosecuted complex criminal matters.  Before joining the U.S. Attorney’s office where served for more than twelve years, Judge Kirsch was a prosecutor for the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington from 1993 to 1997.  From 1991 to 1993, Judge Kirsch was also a law clerk for Judge William Zloch of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida.
  
  Judge Kirsch graduated from Emory University and Fordham Law School.

Mr. Farbiarz and Judge Kirsch are the 7^th and 8^th federal judge nominations by President Biden to the District of New Jersey bench.