Khurram’s Quorum – Ep 042: Judge Vince Chhabria on how case management is justice, and the biggest surprise from the bench

Khurram’s Quorum – Ep 042: Judge Vince Chhabria on how case management is justice, and the biggest surprise from the bench

Judge Vince Chhabria is a district court judge in the Northern District of California. When I shared with previous podcast guests I was interviewing Judge Chhabria, the excitement was palpable - these experienced litigators think of Judge Chhabria as "insightful", "focused", and "sharp", and this is a rare opportunity to learn how an influential judge thinks.

We also discuss how he researched and considered precedent for the recent Kadrey v. Meta decision on fair use in generative AI.

Any lawyer looking for an original approach to career decisions and how they practice should listen to this episode.

Keep reading below for the full link to the episode and the full transcript of our conversation.

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Top Insights

Below are the highlights of our conversation:

• Public Service as the North Star: Judge Chhabria’s entire career, from his time at the San Francisco City Attorney's Office to his current role on the bench, is defined by a deep commitment to the public interest. He emphasizes that a district judge’s greatest service is to move cases along efficiently and transparently so that justice is not hindered by undue delay.
• Plain Language and Accessibility: One of Judge Chhabria’s core beliefs is that for the law to be legitimate, it must be understandable. This drives his unique writing style—characterized by directness and brevity. He encourages writing for the "sophisticated non-lawyer" to ensure that judicial decisions are accessible to the public they serve.
• Hiring for Character (The "Nice People" Rule): In a field often associated with "sharp elbows" and extreme competitiveness, the Judge prioritizes hiring law clerks who are simply nice. He finds that creating a collegial, collaborative environment in chambers not only produces better work but also yields clerks who are more successful in their long-term careers, including at the Supreme Court.

Full Transcript

Khurram Naik: Judge Chhabria, thanks for joining. This is a really great opportunity to share your experience, so I’m excited to have you on.

Judge Chhabria: Oh yeah, thank you for having me.

Khurram Naik: So, I want to start with your experience in the San Francisco City Attorney's Office and what you had shared previously, which is that you had chosen to go to that office, which was somewhat of a surprising departure given some of the experiences you had and credentials you had. I’d like to hear a little more about the decision that led you to join that office.

Judge Chhabria: Yeah. I mean, I will say that nowadays, going to a place like the San Francisco City Attorney's Office is not really the road less traveled. I mean, it's much more well-known, a sought-after job nowadays given all the work that the San Francisco City Attorney's Office has done and other city attorneys' offices have done across the country over the last decade or so. But back in, let's see, what was it, 2004 or 2005, when I was deciding what to do after spending a couple of years at my law firm in San Francisco, I was doing white-collar practice in the law firm, and so the natural next step for somebody who wants to go into public service who does white-collar stuff at a firm is to go to the U.S. Attorney's Office. Or at least it was back in those days.

And so I did apply to the U.S. Attorney's Office thinking that this would be a cool way to go into public service. I didn't hear back from the U.S. Attorney's Office for quite a while, and so that got me to sort of think more broadly about why I went to law school, what I might want to do with my law degree, and how I would want to serve the public. And what I realized eventually is that although being an Assistant U.S. Attorney is a great job and you can really accomplish a lot if you do that job responsibly, it wasn't really why I went to law school. I went to law school to be involved in kind of constitutional public policy type issues that were important to the community.

And so I started looking around and stumbled upon the City Attorney's Office in San Francisco. And in particular, I discovered the government litigation team in the City Attorney's Office. That team was responsible for defending constitutional and other type challenges to city policies, city laws, and city policies. And they were also doing the marriage equality litigation; they were challenging California's statutory ban on same-sex marriage. And so all of that stuff really appealed to me. Once I learned more about the office, I realized that this is precisely the kind of job that I went to law school to get. And so I applied there and quickly got hired by them and it was really the best career decision I ever made to go to the City Attorney's Office after my time at the law firm.

Khurram Naik: Can you say more about what—you had some expectations to get out of the experience and then you probably gained things that were surprising out of it. So what surprised you about your time in the office?

Judge Chhabria: I guess the variety is one of the things that really surprised me. Like I said, I went to this team where the primary duty was to defend challenges to city policies. But our office also had started a robust affirmative litigation practice. The city attorney, Dennis Herrera, started the affirmative litigation task force, which consisted of lawyers from different teams all across the office, and I joined that task force and got involved in affirmative litigation.

There was the marriage equality litigation as I mentioned. And so in the City Attorney's Office—it’s both a city and a county—the government does a lot of stuff. There were almost, I think, 200 lawyers in the office when I was there, and every issue under the sun comes within the purview of the City Attorney's Office. There was the land use team, the healthcare team, the tax team, the code enforcement team, the labor and employment team, the trial team—which does a lot of your bread-and-butter trial work defending police officers or, you know, the bus runs over somebody or whatever and there's a lawsuit about it. There's a team out at the airport that does legal issues relating to the airport. Any number of different teams and any number of different legal issues. And so it's like if you're into public policy and local government and law, you're like a kid in a candy store. There's going to be something interesting for you in the City Attorney's Office. So that really surprised me and it was also one of the really cool things about the job.

Khurram Naik: Is it the case—I mean you described a very generalist practice and Article III courts are courts of limited jurisdiction, but there’s still a generalist variety of the nature of the work you work on. Do you see a pretty straightforward connection between the generalist variety of the practice in the Attorney's Office and then the impact that had on the bench? I’m curious about the ways in which your experience there prepared you for the bench.

Judge Chhabria: Yeah, it is kind of similar. One of the other things that I did in the City Attorney's Office is I became the Chief of Appellate Litigation. And so in that capacity, I'm overseeing the appeals in all of our cases coming from all of our teams. So I was able to dabble in a lot of different areas of law and learn about a lot of different areas of law, and this job is very similar in that you'll look at securities cases and civil rights cases and intellectual property cases, constitutional cases, employment discrimination cases, etc., etc. And oftentimes the case will present an issue that you've never had to deal with before and you've never learned about before. And so I do think there was a parallel from my old job to my new one in that respect.

Khurram Naik: And then, at least historically, there wasn't a very tried-and-true path from the City Attorney's Office to an Article III role. Can you talk about that path and is it becoming more common now? Tell me some more about that transition.

Judge Chhabria: Yeah. Well, I think that back when I went to the City Attorney's Office, I never really planned on becoming a judge and it was never my goal to become a judge. I think if it had been my goal, I would have gone to the U.S. Attorney's Office, right? Because back then, it was so common for prosecutors and BigLaw people to get put on the bench. I mean the federal bench was filled primarily with federal prosecutors and BigLaw people. And so—but like I said, that's not something that was on my mind back then. I was focused on doing the job that would be most interesting and most fulfilling for me.

But as it turns out, that decision probably contributed to my ultimately becoming a federal judge. Because in Obama's second term, they started focusing really heavily on experiential diversity, and that's something that continued in the Biden administration. And I think they realized, starting in Obama's second term, that we have too many former federal prosecutors and BigLaw people on the bench and we need experiential diversity. We need people who have had different work experiences and come at it with different perspectives. And so they started looking for defenders, they started looking for people who maybe were solo practitioners—I mean somebody who was nominated with me and had her confirmation hearing with me was a solo practitioner—and local government lawyers. And so I think that actually my professional experience, once I decided to apply for the bench, my professional experience was a benefit. And you know, that's just something that you can never predict, but it turned out well in that regard.

Khurram Naik: What changed your mind about taking an interest in becoming a federal judge?

Judge Chhabria: Well, I don't know if it's so much that I changed my mind, it's just something that I never particularly thought about or had as a goal. I always thought that I would be one of those Washington policy lawyer types who kind of bounced in and out of administrations and was involved in federal policymaking and federal legal issues. I also thought that I always assumed that I would be working on stuff that would be too controversial to allow me to become a federal judge. And certainly at the time that was true of marriage equality, right? Back in 2005, when lawyers who worked in favor of marriage equality, that was sort of considered a strike on their resume probably from the standpoint of getting on the bench.

Judge Chhabria’s path from the City Attorney’s office to the federal bench is one way government service shapes a career — Manisha Sheth took another, moving between elite private practice and the New York Attorney General’s office twice.

But eventually the tide turned. And once the tide turned, I remember that the folks from the South Asian Bar Association approached me about whether I would be interested in applying for the bench. And in particular, the head of SABA Northern California at the time, Karen Jan, raised the issue with me. I think she was the first person ever to raise this issue with me and kind of encouraged me to apply and was a big supporter of mine throughout the process. And when she did raise it with me, I thought, "Hey, that actually would be really cool, maybe I should think about that," and I put my name in not too long after that.

Khurram Naik: What did you think would be cool?

Judge Chhabria: Well, I did clerk for three years in the federal courts, and so I had a sense of what a fun and rewarding job it could be. And one of the things that's great about it, we already discussed, right? It's that you get a bunch of interesting issues and it's constantly new stuff and you're constantly having to deal with new challenges and learn new issues and decide new issues. And so it's stimulating in that respect.

The other thing is that it is rewarding. It very much feels, particularly I will say at the district court level, it feels like if you are rolling up your sleeves and doing a good job on a day-to-day basis, you are making a contribution to the community. It might not be some giant mega-contribution, but in little ways, whether it's how you're dealing with sentencing, criminal sentencing, or how you're deciding cases or how you're managing the cases. If you do a good job, you're making a positive contribution to the community. And so that was what—and I had that sense before I applied because of having clerked here. And so that's what made the job attractive to me.

Khurram Naik: And now you're more than 10 years into the role. What’s surprised you the most about the role?

Judge Chhabria: Probably a couple of different things. Number one is I assumed when I started that a pretty high percentage of the motions would only have one reasonable answer. That precedent would dictate the answer in most of the motions, and reasonable judges could not disagree on the answer. That is certainly true of some motions, but I would say it's a much lower percentage. I think I probably assumed that was going to be like 80% of the motions and it's probably closer to 40%. So that means on most of the motions, reasonable judges could disagree on the outcome of the motion. And so it's more challenging than expected and probably more rewarding than I expected too because again, if you do a good job and you think you're getting the right answer, you're making a contribution.

So that's one. The other thing that really surprised me was I was expecting the civil case management part of the job to be boring. And I listened, you had a great interview with Judge Koh-Nelli a while ago, and he talked a lot about case management. You could tell from the way he was talking about it that he found it rewarding too and that he understood that if you do a really good job managing the cases, that is one way in which you're making a really positive contribution to justice and to the community. And I sort of expected when I came into it that it would be just more a case of housekeeping and setting dates and kind of this mundane scheduling stuff. But then I realized, largely for the reasons discussed by Judge Koh-Nelli, that how you manage the case really has an impact on how things go for the litigants, the cost of the litigation for the litigants, and whether justice is being served, frankly. So I have found the case management side of things to be quite rewarding, and that was a big surprise for me.

Khurram Naik: So I think it might be interesting to talk about your process for your work product, your opinions, because a lot of practitioners I talk to—a number of whom I've interviewed previously—there's a very clear consensus among them that your opinions are notably more direct and often shorter than other federal judges. And so what process would another federal judge, let's say a federal judge new to the bench, use to communicate like you?

Judge Chhabria: Well, I think, you know, I go back to when I first started the job, and I think that part of this comes from the public service focus. I mean, I came from a public service job and I view this, again, as a public service job. It's a gold-plated public service job—people are like opening the door for you and stuff like that—but it is: we are here to figure out the best way to serve the public. So when I started, and even before I started, I really thought carefully about what's the best way as a district judge to serve the public.

And I think an underrated way of doing that is moving the docket along, moving the cases along quickly, not protecting against undue delay. There are circuit judges who have more time to ponder these issues really deeply and take a long time to write long opinions and all that. But if we treated the cases like circuit judges would, we as district judges would be doing a disservice to the public, I think, because the parties need to get an answer from you on the legal issue that they've teed up in front of you so that they can decide how to proceed. Whether they can decide whether to settle or whether to go to trial or whether to appeal or whether to change a policy or whatever the case may be.

And so I always thought an underrated part of serving the public well in this job is moving the cases along. And so I designed the system within chambers largely with that in mind. So what that means is that we don't have bench memos. We don't do bench memos here where the law clerk lays out the arguments being made by both sides and discusses the case law and then makes a recommendation. I sort of thought that is probably in most cases a waste of time. Instead, we sit down, usually on a Monday, to discuss the hearings that are coming up on Thursday. Sometimes we'll sit down earlier, but usually it's on a Monday and I often will not have started reading the materials yet. If it's a big case, I will already have started reading the materials, but often I will not have started reading the materials yet.

And the law clerks will just start presenting the cases to me, telling me what the issues are, identifying the key cases that I need to make sure to read and the key evidence that I need to make sure to look at, etc., etc. And they will give me a sort of help me strategize for how to prepare for the hearing. And then I'll start reading the briefs and the cases and the papers and stuff like that and I'll circle back with the law clerks and ask follow-up questions: what about this, what about that, etc. And then that's how we prepare for the hearing.

We might also decide that we don't need a hearing and we'll vacate the hearing and decide it on the papers if it's an easy case. And then after the hearing, and usually shortly after the hearing, we will issue a very short ruling, right? And we use the term "MemDispo" here. You know, in the Ninth Circuit, the Ninth Circuit will do two types of rulings: they'll do published opinions and they'll do unpublished memorandum dispositions. And the unpublished memorandum disposition is usually a short ruling that presumes that the reader is familiar with the arguments made by the parties, the facts of the case, the applicable legal standard, etc. And it'll just get right to the point, a short and sweet explanation for why one side wins and the other side loses.

That—95% of our rulings are in the MemDispo style. And so we don't take the time to write long—the clerks don't take the time to write long bench memos and we don't convert those long bench memos into long district court opinions. We just do a quick—we do explain our reasoning, we make clear why one side wins and the other side loses, but the theory is it's better to get them a short ruling quickly than it is to get them a long, winding ruling much later down the line. And so that's the system that we adopted when I first got here and it's largely stayed that way ever since. And I think it's worked really well. I think it's helped us manage the cases, manage the docket well, and move things along well while still allowing for careful consideration of the issues.

The value Judge Chhabria places on plain language — writing for the “sophisticated non-lawyer” — connects to what Rakesh Kilaru calls the “courage to cut”: simplifying arguments to what actually matters.

Now, there's probably 5% or 10% of the motions where we will decide that we need to do a full-length opinion, like a proper judicial opinion with a factual background section and a legal standard section and all of that. Maybe it's because it's a matter of significant public interest, maybe it's because we feel that the case law is muddled and there's something that we can say that might help sort of clear up the case law, or something along those lines. And so in that situation, we'll do a more full-length opinion and it'll often take longer to get out. But by minimizing the number of those that we do, we're able to move the docket along much faster. I guess the only other comment I'll make about that is that as I am on the bench longer—I've been here 11 years now—I'm sort of committed to doing more full-length opinions because I think I know the job a little better and sort of maybe have a little more to offer than I did eight years ago or six years ago or whatever, and so we're probably doing a bit more full-length opinions than we did at the outset.

Khurram Naik: And it seems some of this is associated with the style—the MemDispo style that you're describing—is plain language, which can be very sharp. Is there a connection between these two? Are they separable?

Judge Chhabria: I think they're—I mean, I think it's easier to do a MemDispo if you're using plain language, direct language. But I think they're kind of two different things because I think that we use those in our opinions too. I think we use pretty plain direct language in our opinions. And our full-length opinions are usually a lot shorter than the typical full-length opinion, by the way. And I think that that's a separate issue but it also has to do with public service, right? That it's really important. The way what I tell my law clerks is: think about somebody who maybe is a non-lawyer, like perhaps a sophisticated non-lawyer, and what do we need to tell them, what do we need to teach them in order for them to be able to understand why we're ruling the way we rule. So you might think about a legislator who is busy and smart but not a trained lawyer or not a practicing lawyer, and what do we need to explain to them in plain language so that they get what we're doing? Or like a busy reporter or something like that. And we just try to write with that sort of reader in mind and try to avoid the legal jargon and a lot of the gobbledygook that we see in judicial opinions, particularly earlier judicial opinions.

Khurram Naik: And then, so if other federal judges seem—whether it's reticence or otherwise—they just don't use that style, both of the length of opinion, plain language, and tone, which I can see as you're saying, let's say a reporter, it's very eye-catching to use some of the rhetoric that you use in some of your opinions. For instance, we'll talk about the Kadri opinion and there’s definitely some strong language in there. And so with that, how would you—let’s say with a new federal judge who's turning to you for some guidance—how would you make the case for, you're saying there's a public interest in the decisions you're making, how would you influence your peer federal judges to be influenced by the style and techniques you're describing here?

Judge Chhabria: Well, I mean, I think it's for every new judge to decide how they want to do it and it depends what you're comfortable with. But I would just say that the law, for the law to be understandable, it needs to be accessible. And I do think that one big problem the judiciary has is not being accessible enough in its writing, and it makes it harder to understand why we decide stuff the way we do.

Khurram Naik: So, in terms of impact of your time on the bench, some leading litigators and lawyers have referred to you as being a leading feeder judge of clerks to the Supreme Court. What is it in your process that has made you such a source of lawyers that go on to clerk at the Supreme Court?

Judge Chhabria: Well, I think that's pretty easy. I've been able to hire law clerk candidates who also end up clerking for great circuit judges. So, people like Michelle Friedland and Sri Srinivasan and a number of others, and those are the people who tend to go clerk at the Supreme Court. The other thing that we focus very heavily on in our hiring process here is making sure that we have nice people. And you know, it's been 11 years now and we've never had a problem person, we've never had somebody with sharp elbows or who's trying to be nicer—be more respectful to the judge than to the janitor—or being competitive with their co-clerks or anything like that. And we work really hard to weed those people out. And those people tend to not be great candidates for the Supreme Court either, frankly, perhaps contrary to popular wisdom. So, that's really all I have to say about that.

Khurram Naik: What do you miss about not being a judge?

Judge Chhabria: Boy, very little. Very little. I mean, the job is so interesting and so low stress. I mean, there is literally nothing to stress about in this job. I mean, you know, maybe one exception is criminal sentencing. You know, those are some, there are sometimes some gut-wrenching decisions there. Another exception might be law clerk hiring—that can be kind of stressful because the stakes are so high because if you do get somebody who's like a problem person in chambers, it could be really bad for the year. And that's why we work so hard to weed out those types. But it's just such a low-stress job.

And you think—I always think about how if I had a big oral argument as a lawyer and I'm driving into work that day, I'm like, you know, going over in my mind all the possible questions I could get and thinking about how I would answer them and making sure I knew in my head where the evidence was in the record to support the points that I was making and like talking to myself in the car. People looking over and staring at me and I guess probably they thought I was on the phone. But, you know, it's stressful. Being a lawyer is stressful and being a lawyer who goes and argues in front of the Ninth Circuit or whatever is, you know, it can be quite stressful.

But when I'm driving into work as a judge and I've got a big hearing, I'm thinking about the questions I can ask. I'm thinking about the things I don't have a good handle on and thinking, "Oh, cool, I'll be able to ask the lawyers these questions. And they will help me, hopefully, understand the answer to these questions that I'm struggling with." And so there's just nothing to stress about because I don't have to have all the answers. I just have to ask the right questions, right? And, you know, I've got my law clerks helping me and all that kind of stuff. So, it's just—there's very little that I miss.

I would say that every once in a while, when I'm driving into work, I might be listening to the radio and there's some something exciting happening in City Hall or some big blow-up in San Francisco politics or something like that and I think to myself, "Oh, I'd like to be in the middle of that and like helping the clients troubleshoot that, helping people solve this problem." But, you know, there's plenty of problem-solving to be done as a judge too, and so I barely ever think about the stuff that I used to do and wish that I could keep doing it. I mean, this job is just remarkable.

Khurram Naik: That's interesting because on one hand I think of like a barbell here. On one hand, you're probably a lot funnier now. You get a lot more people laughing at your jokes.

Judge Chhabria: Yeah, that's one thing I miss. Actually, that's something—that's good, I’m glad you brought that up—because the other thing I miss is getting honest critical feedback. Because I don't—it is virtually impossible for a judge to get honest critical feedback. My best source of honest critical feedback can be from my law clerks, but even then, I think sometimes law clerks are nervous to give you honest critical feedback. And, you know, that's something that I always have sought throughout my career as a lawyer and even as a judge. and I think that's how you get better, right? Is that you continue to question yourself, you continue to seek critical feedback, and I do miss not being able to get nearly as much of that in this job.

Khurram Naik: Well, how do you contextualize then the critical feedback because I think of, say, appellants—they're going to have some critical feedback about a decision. Half these outcomes, you know, half the people are going to be dissatisfied with your decision and have something substantive to say about it. And then there's the appellate court; they’ve got feedback for your decision. Aren't those forms of feedback that are relevant or is there something different about that?

Judge Chhabria chose the City Attorney’s Office over the U.S. Attorney’s Office for its constitutional policy work. Jaimie Nawaday took the AUSA path at SDNY — and it was there that the Bank of America trial transformed her career.

Judge Chhabria: I think there's something different about that. That's not so much about how you do your job and whether you're doing a good job, right? Because, you know, if you get reversed by the circuit, it might be because you missed the issue—like you made a mistake, right? But again, that's I think that part of being a good district judge is not spending all your time trying to avoid mistakes, right? Because that then comes at the expense of moving the cases along and, you know, the justice system functioning properly. So, but if you get reversed it might be because you made a mistake, or it might be because the circuit made a mistake, or it might be because reasonable—and this is most common, right—reasonable judges can differ on the outcome. And so it's not—I don't really view a reversal as criticism of how you did your job. It's just part of the system, right?

Khurram Naik: So the other part is you deal with these really consequential decisions. For the Northern District of California, it’s a very important jurisdiction nationally. There's high-stakes matters, for instance involving this administration. There’s a variety of—we’ll talk about the Kadri matter in a moment. So, there are these high-stakes matters, matters of first impression. You’re saying that you don't really feel a lot of pressure in those scenarios? Because sitting here thinking about what it would feel like to be in your shoes, I feel that I would have a lot of pressure. But it sounds like you don't experience that.

Judge Chhabria: No. I mean, it's pressure is when you have to make a decision like really quickly. And sometimes in the, you know, when you get a preliminary injunction motion or a TRO application, you have that, I guess. But no, I you know, it's I view it as like a pleasure and a privilege to be working on these kinds of issues.

Khurram Naik: Okay, so we teed up the Kadri decision, and you mentioned this concept of, you know, potentially there being disagreements and I think this decision will be an interesting lens on that. So, first, if you can give some context for the decision. We recognize it's an ongoing matter, so we’ll be careful in the scope of what we discuss here. But can you speak about the process you used to arrive at the market dilution framework you proposed for fair use?

Judge Chhabria: Yeah. Well, maybe first by way of background, just so that people know what the case is about. And I do need to be very careful and limit myself only to stuff that I have said from the bench or said in my ruling, because it is an ongoing case. But it's a lawsuit by book authors, right, who claim that it's copyright infringement for Meta to use their books to train its generative AI models without compensating them. And Meta's argument is that it's fair use, right? That using copyrighted books to train AI models falls within the fair use exception to copyright infringement.

And so a few months ago we had oral argument on summary judgment and Meta's lawyer, Kannon Shanmugam, focused heavily on the fact that the purpose of the copying is transformative, right? That the copying is being done to create something very different from the original. And often that'll be dispositive in copyright cases, right? If the copying is for a transformative purpose, it's going to be considered fair use and it's not copyright infringement. But what I said at the hearing and in my subsequent ruling is that the AI situation is potentially different, right? Yes, the use is transformative, I don't think there's any doubt about that. But the thing that copyright law cares about most is preserving the incentives for artists to create.

And if you let a company copy protected books for the purpose of creating a product that enables the production of literally millions of books in the same genre using only a minuscule fraction of the human creativity, that has serious potential to harm the market for the books that were copied. And so I said that this is one of those situations where copying the book for a transformative purpose might not get you out of copyright infringement. That's the market dilution point that you referenced, right? The issue in our case was that the plaintiffs didn't put in any evidence that they would be harmed by market dilution, and so I granted summary judgment in favor of Meta in this particular case against these particular individual plaintiffs.

You asked how I got to the issue. In this case, we were fortunate enough to have a bunch of amicus briefs filed on both sides. That's very rare in district court cases, but obviously this is a big case. And so even though the parties didn't address the issue too much in their briefs, the plaintiffs didn't address the issue too much in their briefs, it was addressed in the amicus briefs and in the sources that the amicus briefs cited. So I read those briefs and read a lot of the sources that they cited and learned about the issue that way and was able to discuss the issue as a result of that.

Khurram Naik: So Judge Alsup had a decision two days earlier. How did you think about the impact of different approaches from colleagues in the same district court on fair use?

Judge Chhabria: Well, I mean, I guess I have a specific response and then a more general response. First, the more general response. My law clerk asked me a similar question—I have new law clerks just come in, they're new now—and one of them asked me, "How should we be thinking about opinions from other judges on the Northern District?" because sometimes the lawyers in the briefs, they will say, "This district has held XYZ," and you look at that and you cock your head and you're like, "Well, what does that mean?" because a ruling by another judge in this district is no more binding or no more should arguably be no more persuasive than a ruling by any other district judge, right? It's not binding on me.

And that's the way I view it, right? That I mean, obviously, I have great colleagues and take very seriously what they have to say. But the fact that multiple colleagues have ruled one way on an issue is not going to be a thumb on the scale for me ruling the same way on that issue. As a matter of fact, I was telling this law clerk the other day that we had one case a few years ago where 11 judges on the Northern District of California dismissed this particular type of claim, and then I got one of these and I disagreed with all 11 of the judges and I denied the motion to dismiss. That was an example of writing a full-length opinion and explaining why, right? But you're obviously going to pay close attention to what the colleagues say, but it doesn't create a thumb on the scales one way or another for how we decide a case in these chambers.

And then you mentioned that Judge Alsup issued a ruling in his AI case a couple days before ours, and Judge Alsup had a very different perspective on the issue than I did. He placed tremendous amount of weight on the transformative nature of the use and that seemed kind of dispositive for him. And so yeah, we got that ruling a couple days before we issued ours, read his ruling, and included a bit of a response to it in our ruling.

Khurram Naik: So, I’m mindful of our time here and since we’ve got a final question. I’ll pose the question is: you’ve had a number of law clerks over the years, and the relationship is a really special one and they really are able to see how you think up close. And so my question for you is, what is your key advice that you give your law clerks? What’s the most important advice you give them on career?

Judge Chhabria: Yeah, I mean, I think it probably goes back to my experience applying for the U.S. Attorney's Office and the City Attorney's Office. I think that you should not be taking a job based on where you think it will get you. You should be taking a job based on how fulfilling and happy it will make you. I know that sometimes there are financial constraints, and I always try to be mindful of that. I know you can’t—not everybody can just go work for the ACLU, right?

But within those financial constraints, definitely don't think about the prestige level of the job, don't think about where it might get you five or ten or twenty years down the road. Just do what is going to be most fulfilling for you and what's going to make you happiest. And that is going to increase the chances of you having success down the road because if you're doing a job that's more fulfilling and makes you happier, you're going to do a better job at it. People are going to like you more because you're going to be happier, they're going to be more likely to want to help you, and all in all, your career is probably going to go better. Plus, you can never really predict which job is going to get you to which place because things are always changing, as my experience shows. And so I think that's the primary advice that I try to give folks.

Khurram Naik: Thanks Judge Chhabria. This is definitely the funniest episode I've recorded yet.

Judge Chhabria: Really? Oh, wow. You need to get some better guests. But anyway, thank you very much. I appreciated you having me and it was a lot of fun.

Khurram Naik: Thanks.