Draft:Cynthia Valenzuela Dixon

Cynthia Valenzuela Dixon (born 1969) is an American lawyer who has served as a judge of the State Bar Court of California since 2016. She is a nominee to serve as a United States district judge of the United States District Court for the Central District of California.

Education
Dixon earned a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Arizona in 1991 and a Juris Doctor from the UCLA School of Law in 1995.

Career
From 1995 to 1998, she was a special assistant at the United States Commission on Civil Rights in Los Angeles; from 1998 to 2000, she was a trial attorney in the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division in Washington, D.C.; from 2000 to 2006, she served as an assistant U.S. attorney in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California. From 2006 to 2011, she was the head of national litigation at the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund in Los Angeles; from 2011 to 2016, she worked as the Criminal Justice Act Supervising Attorney for the Central District of California in Los Angeles. Since 2016, she has served as a judge of the California State Bar Court in Los Angeles since her appointment by the California Supreme Court.

Nomination to district court
On April 24, 2024, President Joe Biden announced his intent to nominate Dixon to serve as a United States district judge of the United States District Court for the Central District of California. On April 30, 2024, her nomination was sent to the Senate. President Biden nominated Dixon to the seat being vacated by Judge Philip S. Gutierrez, who will assume senior status on October 15, 2024. On May 22, 2024, a hearing on her nomination was held before the Senate Judiciary Committee. On July 11, 2024, her nomination was favorably reported out of the Senate Judiciary Committee by an 11–10 vote. Her nomination is pending before the United States Senate.