Leftist Progressive Judge: Nusrat Choudhury

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An independent judiciary that administers equal and impartial justice under the law is under siege by left-wing, progressivejudges enacting their social justice agenda. This article profiles one such judge, Nusrat Choudhury, the first Bangladeshi-American and first Muslim-American woman to serve as a federal judge.

President Biden nominated Ms. Choudhury for the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York in January 2022,along with seven other federal judicial nominees. The White House statement announcing these nominations said that they“continue to fulfill the President’s promise to ensure that the nation’s courts reflect the diversity that is one of our greatest assets as a country — both in terms of personal and professional backgrounds.” The Senate confirmed Ms. Choudhury’s nomination in June 2023 by a vote of 50-49.

Judge Choudhury, who spent a substantial part of her legal career as an ACLU lawyer, brings to the federal bench her extremist worldview that focuses on group identity and an oppressor-oppressed binary framework. This is the framework that the Left uses to defines “social justice.” They seek to fundamentally transform America’s basic legal, governmental, economic, and societal institutions as well as America’s cultural norms.

In an interview after Ms. Choudhury became the Legal Director of the ACLU of Illinois, she declared that “my purpose in life is to make sure we use the law as a tool for social justice.”

Back in 2018, Ms. Choudhury said that the criminal justice system is “premised on structural inequality.“ This former ACLU lawyer charged that “A lot of the racial animus that undergirded apartheid in America was shifted into the criminal justice system.“ She added that “the criminal justice system started doing the work of apartheid, which was criminalizing low-income Black and Latino people and keeping them down.”

In 2021, Ms. Choudhury painted America’s policing systems with a broad brush as institutions “grounded in slavery and segregation and upholding institutions of racial insubordination.”

After Ms. Choudhury became a federal judge, she did not abandon pursuing her “purpose in life…to make sure we use the law as a tool for social justice.” Indeed, she lost little time before issuing a pro-transgender athlete ruling.

Judge Choudhury allowed the far-left New York Attorney General Letitia James to continue her legal action seeking to invalidate a Nassau County executive order that bans girls’ and women’s sports teams with transgender athletes from using county facilities.

Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman defended the need for the executive order in a federal lawsuit that he brought against Attorney General James’ efforts to quash the ban. A biological sixteen-year-old girl athlete who plays volleyball joined the lawsuit as a plaintiff through her parents.

The complaint stated that “the Executive Order lawfully levels the playing field and ensures safe and equal opportunities for biological girls and women to participate in the same way and numbers historically enjoyed by their male counterpoints. This is not mere rhetoric, but is rooted in actual examples of transgender girls having injured biological girls during sporting events.”

The complaint cited specific examples of such injuries. For instance, the complaint noted that this year “a girls basketball team went so far as to forfeit a game because a transgender girl (i.e. biological male) injured three girls and the coach felt compelled to terminate his team’s participation in order to prevent further injury to the biologically female athletes by the 6-foot-tall biologically male transgender player.”

Another example that the complaint pointed out to Judge Choudhury involved a high school biological girl injured by a transgender girl that occurred during a volleyball game: “The injured student suffered a concussion and neck injury after the transgender female spiked the volleyball which, in turn, struck the female student in the face.” The student also suffered anxiety and depression following her physical injuries. In testimony offered to the North Carolina legislature, the student noted that “[a]llowing biological males to compete against biological females is dangerous. I may be the first to come before you…but I won’t be the last.”

The sixteen-year-old biological girl who played volleyball in Nassau County likely joined the federal lawsuit through her parents out of fear of being seriously injured. She did not want to become another casualty of an unfair and dangerous volleyball competition where athletically superior biological males who self-identify as transgender girls are pitted against biological girls who are at a major physical disadvantage.

Judge Choudhury could care less. She first rejected the plaintiffs’ motion for a temporary restraining order against Attorney General James’ legal action. Then, she dismissed the lawsuit out of hand altogether, ignoring the complaint’s concrete examples of the serious injuries to biological girls that have occurred when transgender girls competed against biological girls.

According to Judge Choudhury, the terms “biological females” and “biological males” are “scientifically ‘imprecise’ and are viewed as derogatory to transgender women and girls.” This progressive ideologue dismissed the long-established science of biology as “imprecise” and elected instead to embrace the trans social justice warriors’ language such as “cisgender women and girls.”

Judge Choudhury did not conduct an evidentiary hearing to examine the complaint’s substantive allegations. Her opinion dismissing the complaint relied on the procedural issue of standing and also incorporated by reference her previous opinion rejecting the temporary restraining order motion. In that prior opinion Judge Choudhury, using the transgender term “cisgender” for biological woman and girls, wrote: “There are no facts in the record showing that any specific cisgender woman or girl in Nassau County will face imminent injury in an athletic event involving a transgender woman or girl on Nassau County Parks property if the Executive Order is invalidated.”

This progressive judge had no interest in hearing any live testimony from the biological girl who had joined NassauCounty’s federal lawsuit through her parents or from her parentsthemselves before deciding the case. She concluded that a biological girl’s legitimate fear of being seriously injured while competing in volleyball games with biological boys who self-identify as girls was not enough to give the girl standing to plead her case. This teenage female volleyball player had to face what Judge Choudhury called “imminent injury” before the judge would listen to her. According to that logic, Nassau County Executive Blakeman said, “the county would have to wait for a young girl to be paralyzed before taking action.”

Judge Choudhury is a left-wing ideologue. She puts her life mission “to use the law as a tool for social justice” ahead of her judicial oath to “administer justice without respect to persons, and do equal right to the poor and to the rich.”

Future articles in this series will profile other like-minded judges who are eroding the fairness and impartiality of the judiciary from within.