1. William Haskell Alsup was born on June 27,1945 and is an American lawyer and jurist serving as senior United States district judge of the US District Court for the Northern District of California.
13 Facts About William Alsup
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William Alsup was appointed to the Northern District of California in 1999 by President Bill Clinton and assumed senior status in 2021.
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William Alsup was a law clerk to Justice William O Douglas of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1971 to 1972.
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William Alsup was again in private practice in San Francisco from 1998 to 1999.
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William Alsup was confirmed by the United States Senate on July 30,1999, and received his commission on August 17,1999.
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William Alsup drew media attention for his familiarity with programming languages, at one point criticizing Oracle counsel David Boies for arguing that the Java function rangeCheck was novel, saying that he had "written blocks of code like rangeCheck a hundred times or more".
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William Alsup was widely described as having learned Java in order to better understand the case, although a 2017 profile in The Verge stated that he had not learned a significant amount of Java, but had rather applied his knowledge as a longtime hobbyist BASIC programmer.
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William Alsup was the presiding judge in what is believed to be the first trial against the US no-fly policy, which is a list of people who cannot use commercial aircraft in the United States.
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In May 2017, Judge William Alsup had ordered Levandowski to refrain from working on Otto's Lidar and required Uber to disclose its discussions on the technology.
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In September 2017, Judge William Alsup was assigned four cases by parties suing to halt President Trump's decision to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program created by Barack Obama.
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On July 27,2018, Judge William Alsup dismissed a lawsuit targeting ExxonMobil on the basis that two California cities, San Francisco and Oakland, could not prove the energy company was responsible for climate change in the state.
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On February 27,2025, William Alsup ruled that mass firings ordered by the Office of Personnel Management at the behest of Elon Musk's DOGE are likely illegal.
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William Alsup owns a 40-acre ranch in the Sierra Nevada foothills.