Ancer L. Haggerty

I found Judge Haggerty to be wholly respectful (and very mellow) in the civil litigation context. I'm not sure how deep he gets personally into the legal issues, but he's certainly willing to have his clerks give full consideration to both sides. (In my case, for instance, he allowed supplemental briefing multiple times to the other side, even though he wound up ruling against them.) On settlement, it's a bit unfair to give him a "1", since the whole district lets magistrates handle that; still, he could have helped nudge the parties more than he did. All in all, however, Judge Haggerty was a pleasure to appear before. Also, his staff is excellent -- very friendly and accommodating.

The 9th Circuit recently vacated and remanded every single ruling he made on his dismissal of indictments against executives of FLIR for securities violations. He got every part of his decision wrong: there was no deceit -- rather, at most, there was a government decision not to conduct the criminal investigation openly, a decision we hold the government was free to make. There is nothing improper about the government undertaking simultaneous criminal and civil investigations, and nothing in the government’s actual conduct of those investigations amounted to deceit or an affirmative misrepresentation justifying the rare sanction of dismissal of criminal charges or suppression of evidence received in the course of the investigations. We also reverse the order excluding evidence received from the conflicted attorney. We do so because the government advised the attorney of the existence of a potential conflict and did not interfere with the attorney-client relationship.