The U.S. Senate on Tuesday voted 50-45 to confirm Chicago resident and U.S. Magistrate Judge Jeffrey Cummings to the federal trial bench.

Cummings, a 1987 graduate of Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law, will become the fifth judge President Joe Biden has appointed to the Northern District of Illinois. He was named after Judge Robert Dow of the Northern District of Illinois was appointed to be counselor to U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts.

Cummings spent 29 years in private law practice in Chicago before the judges of the Northern District of Illinois selected him in 2019 to be a federal magistrate judge. Cummings earned a bachelor’s degree from Michigan State University and then earned his law degree. He worked for two years as a law clerk for Judge Ann Claire Williams of the Northern District.

From 1989 until 2019, Cummings was a lawyer with the law firm Miner, Barnhill & Galland, where he was named partner in 1995. While there, he specialized in the areas of employment law, housing discrimination, health care law and representing whistleblowers under the False Claims Act, according to his Senate Judiciary Committee questionnaire. Cummings also was a hearing officer from 2016 to 2019 for the Chicago Police Board, and he was an administrative hearing officer for the Chicago Commission on Human Relations from 1995 to 2019.

In January, Cummings was nominated to be a federal district judge after Sens. Richard Durbin and Tammy Duckworth recommended him in 2021 to the White House as a potential nominee.

At a U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in February, Durbin said that in Cummings’ time as a magistrate judge, he has “displayed an evenhanded judicial temperament and dedication to the rule of law.”

“He has an impressive breadth of experience in federal court, as a litigator and magistrate judge,” Durbin said.

At the same Judiciary Committee hearing, Cummings told senators that being nominated by Biden to be a federal judge was the “high point of my professional career.” He noted that both his parents worked in the public sector as educators in Madison, Wisconsin.

“My parents … raised us with love, guidance, a tad bit of discipline and a lot of inspiration for their careers of public service,” Cummings said at the hearing.

All Democratic senators present — along with one senator who caucuses with Democrats — voted Tuesday to confirm Cummings, as did three Republican senators.

“I was surprised that the confirmation vote was rather close, because Cummings had a smooth (Judiciary Committee) hearing and panel approval,” said University of Richmond law professor Carl Tobias, a longtime scholar of federal judicial selection. “However, four Democrats did not vote, and the GOP often engages in lockstep voting.”

Tobias added that Cummings’ background in civil rights and voting rights may explain some opposition, “but that work should be viewed as positive.”

“Judge Cummings possesses very strong qualifications,” Tobias said. “He has served as a magistrate judge, which makes him intimately familiar with the types of cases that he will be resolving as a district judge. He practiced for three decades at a respected law firm litigating many important civil rights, racial and gender discrimination and voting rights cases. And he will provide ethnic diversity as one of two Black men now serving on the court. Citizen trust in the courts is enhanced when the bench reflects the community and different perspectives can improve decision-making.”

With Cummings’ confirmation, the Senate has confirmed 104 federal trial court judges in the United States since Biden became president. He also has won confirmation of 36 federal appeals court judges and one Supreme Court justice, Ketanji Brown Jackson.

Goldsborough is a freelance reporter.