Dialogue Vanderbilt, the Vanderbilt Student Chapter of the American Constitution Society (ACS), and the Vanderbilt Student Chapter of the Federalist Society (FedSoc) welcomed Judge Vince Chhabria for a lunchtime conversation, as part of Dialogue Vanderbilt’s 250 Conversations on America: Civil Discourse in Action series.
Judge Chhabria, who sits on the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, reflected on his career, discussing judicial separation from policymaking, intentional ideological diversity, and new rulings on AI policy.
Nominated to the federal court by President Barack Obama in 2013 and confirmed by the Senate in 2014, Judge Chhabria has presided on a broad range of cases throughout the past decade. He held several distinguished clerkships and worked in the private and public sectors.
Francesca Schuler, Executive Director of Dialogue Vanderbilt, kicked off the conversation. ACS President Sapna Desai ‘28 and FedSoc President Tom Farlow ‘27 served as moderators.
Reflections on His Career as a Litigator
Judge Chhabria discussed working for the San Francisco City Attorney’s Office at a particularly impactful moment. The office was challenging California’s ban on same-sex marriage and defending challenges to city policies. California Governor Gavin Newsom, then Mayor of San Francisco, was also leading a number of “cutting-edge” policies alongside the Board of Supervisors. As chief of appellate litigation, he pursued a number of significant public and constitutional matters, including the successful defense of San Francisco’s universal health care program, marriage equality litigation, and equal protection cases.
“Aside from litigating, we got to interact in a meaningful way with policymakers,” Judge Chhabria said. “If we were defending a challenge to a policy sponsored by a member of the board of supervisors, we needed to interact with them regularly, involving them in strategy discussions.”
The Unexpected Features of District Court
Judge Chhabria explained that while the physical and economic qualities of a district often influence a court’s scope of work (i.e., criminal immigration in border districts, admiralty cases in coastal districts, complex financial matters in New York). his Northern California district caseload is quite diverse.
“We have a lot of [cases] coming out of Silicon Valley, but also local governments innovating and getting challenged in court,” he explained. “Some constitutional challenges, a lot of class actions… there’s also a lot of multi-district litigation cases… and of course, depending on who is president, we get a number of challenges to federal policies in our district.”
Judge Chhabria also noted a higher number of decisions that reasonable judges could disagree about. “I expected that around 90 percent of motions would be governed clearly by existing precedents and would be more mechanical,” he said. “I would say it’s actually more 70 percent, which makes it more challenging and interesting.”
Forum Shopping and Transcending Ideological Lines
Desai inquired about “forum shopping” — the tactic of filing a lawsuit in a jurisdiction that might be more favorable to a case. Judge Chhabria acknowledged that as lawyers, engaging in the practice can be key to winning but risks compromising the legitimacy of judicial decisions, especially in ideologically charged cases. He floated the possibility of Congress passing legislation to limit the forum shopping problem, including randomly assigned judges.
Regarding emergency motions that come into his court seeking to stop federal administration policies, Judge Chhabria held his commitment to avoiding bias in these cases, even when he politically disagrees.
“It’s really important to remember you are a judge, not a policymaker,” he said. “There is still a lane we have to operate in, and we should not be stretching the law or facts or reinterpreting the record to reach a result we might prefer. I have not done a count, but I think [my district] has probably ruled in favor of the Trump Administration about 40 or 50 percent of the time.”
Judge Chhabria briefly discussed one such case during the first Trump administration, where he denied a motion for a preliminary injunction to stop the administration’s cuts of federal subsidies under the Affordable Care Act because Congress had never actually appropriated permanent funds for those subsidies.
“I remember there was a headline on the front page of the New York Times about this Obama judge ruling in favor of the Trump Administration,” Judge Chhabria said. “I was glad to see it, because there was this real perception that judges were voting along party lines all the time.”
When asked about not being siloed into his own ideological viewpoint, Judge Chhabria described how he engages with other stances. While he attended ACS’s first convention, Judge Chhabria only participates in events where both ACS and FedSoc are present. He also seeks ideological diversity in clerk hiring and listens to podcasts from more conservative lawyers.
Tech-Related Copyright Rulings
Seated in the Northern District of California, Judge Chhabria has presided over cases dealing with the latest issues in AI and big tech.
One of his current cases concerned to AI copyright law and the fair use doctrine, which exempts certain copies of protected works from copyright law, where the work has been considerably transformed or minimally affects the original work’s market. Meta has employed the fair use doctrine as a response to authors who have alleged that Meta is infringing on copyright law by using their books to train AI models.
Judge Chhabria noted that the work being copied by AI models also needs to be considered; that there is a difference between using a person’s memoir, textbook, or romance novel.
“A lot of the cases that come out of Silicon Valley, because companies are doing things that are so different from what has been done before,” he said. “The case law, the precedent has no real answer to the legal questions that are presented by what the company is doing.”
Dialogue Vanderbilt’s 250 Conversations on America: Civil Discourse in Action is a yearlong series celebrating our nation’s 250th anniversary and Vanderbilt’s enduring commitment to open dialogue. These conversations are real dialogue that moves beyond sound bites and performance to tackle some of the most pressing issues of our time and brings curiosity and conversation back to the public square. Like the conversation with Judge Chhabria, they explore how “disagree” and “agree” can come with nuance, while evidence and civility can shape a stronger, more connected future.