Colleen Melody said she’s done interviews for two jobs in the past 12 years. Bob Ferguson conducted both.
About a decade ago, Ferguson, then Washington’s attorney general, chose her to lead his office’s new civil rights unit devoted to investigating and enforcing anti-discrimination laws.
On Monday, Ferguson, now governor, named Melody as Washington’s newest state Supreme Court justice.
Melody, 43, will succeed Justice Mary Yu, who announced her retirement in September.
“Anyone who has had any interaction with Colleen in a legal setting would all agree that she has a brilliant legal mind,” Ferguson said at a news conference in the Supreme Court chambers at the Temple of Justice in Olympia.
Melody said “the toughest question” in the hiring process was why she wanted to leave a job she so enjoyed.
“I never dreamt of being a judge,” she said. She added that working the past decade with individuals and juries, and in courthouses across the state, incited the desire.
Though the U.S. Supreme Court and federal courts are in the headlines, “state courts are actually the place where most of us who are able to access justice go to seek it,” Melody said, adding that they have “never been more important than they are right now.”
Yu will leave the court at the end of the year. An election will be held next year to complete the remainder of Yu’s term, which runs through Dec. 31, 2028.
This is Ferguson’s first appointment to the state’s high court. Sixteen people applied. He said he was evaluating applicants for their intellectual capacity, work ethic and ability to build consensus with other justices.
Melody, a native of Spokane and graduate from the University of Washington law school, worked previously in the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division.
Ferguson, then attorney general, created the Wing Luke Civil Rights Division and hired Melody to guide the new department in 2015.
In her tenure, Melody has established the division as a “national powerhouse” for standing up for the rights of Washingtonians, “and, we’ve seen, many Americans as well,” Ferguson said.
In 2017, Melody helped lead Washington’s successful challenge to President Trump’s first travel ban, which barred the citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States.
This year, Melody’s team won the first temporary restraining order against the second Trump Administration’s attempt to revoke birthright citizenship, protecting the constitutional rights of everyone born in this country.
“She’s a unique talent,” Ferguson said.
Washington’s nine state Supreme Court justices are elected to six-year terms with vacancies filled by appointment of the governor until the next general election. The only requirement for the office is that a prospective justice be admitted to the practice of law in Washington state.
Justice Sal Mungia, the newest member, was sworn into office in January following his narrow election win in November 2024.
Each year, justices are asked to review more than a thousand cases, mostly from state appeals courts and some from superior courts.
Melody, during her remarks Monday, noted problems with declining credibility in courts and said that “the rule of law seems more fragile than it has to me at any point during my lifetime.”
“It seemed important to me,” she said, “that people of goodwill, who are willing to work hard and who have deep faith in the courts as cornerstones of democracy, that those people be willing to raise their hands and serve.”
This story was originally published in the Washington State Standard.
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