LA civil rights attorney picked as Newsom’s legal affairs secretary

A controversial former Los Angeles lawyer who revolutionized civil rights law in education during the Obama administration will be Gov.-elect Gavin Newsom’s legal affairs secretary, Newsom’s office announced Thursday.

Catherine E. Lhamon will step down as chair of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights to join Newsom’s team, cutting short a six-year appointment that followed her four years as head of the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights.

The legal affairs secretary advises the governor on choosing judges.

Newsom also appointed Anthony Williams, the policy director and special counsel to former state Senate President Darrell Steinberg, a Democrat, as legislative affairs secretary.

“I pledged that my administration would reflect not only the best and brightest but the diverse talents of our state and a passion for public service and giving voice to the voiceless — and that’s exactly what Catherine and Anthony represent,” Newsom said in a statement.

Lhamon, who also litigates civil rights cases as of counsel for the National Center for Youth Law, was key in expanding the Department of Education’s ban on sex discrimination to include gender identity.

She was angered when President Donald J. Trump withdrew the guidance, telling the Daily Journal in a February 2017 article, “The decision to withdraw federal guidance and not replace it sows confusion where none existed.”

Lhamon could not be reached for comment Thursday.

Congress never authorized the Obama administration guidance, which meant it wasn’t binding. But Lhamon said the Department of Education maximized its impact by aggressively acting.

“I don’t know what more we could have done with the time we had,” Lhamon said last year.

At the department’s Office of Civil Rights, she pushed universities to beef up their adjudication of claims of campus sexual assault and to lower the standard of proof, a stance that won praise from feminist groups for protecting victims but has drawn sharp criticism from other civil rights advocates and from judges that it violated the due process rights of accused students.

The Obama administration policy, set forth in a 2011 letter to universities before Lhamon’s arrival, instructed schools to use a “preponderance of the evidence” standard when judging sexual violence cases arising under Title IX.

The guidance, and its application by universities across the nation, has come under fire in several state and federal court rulings.

Betsy DeVos, Trump’s education secretary, rescinded the letter last year and released a proposed rewrite of the rules colleges should follow when investigating sexual assault and harassment cases last month.

Lhamon received her bachelor’s degree in American Studies from Amherst College before graduating from Yale Law School, where she was honored as the outstanding woman law graduate. She spent a year as a clerk for Judge William A. Norris on the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, then was supervising attorney in the appellate litigation program at Georgetown University Law Center from 1997 to 1999.

She moved to California in 1999 and spent 10 years at the ACLU of Southern California, where she was racial justice director and assistant legal director.

Lhamon left in 2009 to join Public Counsel as director of impact litigation, then returned to Washington, D.C., to serve as assistant secretary for civil rights at the education department in 2013.