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Revision as of 20:43, 27 April 2010 by Neutrabar (talk | contribs)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)A. Howard Matz (born 1943) is an American lawyer and judge. He has sat on the United States District Court for the Central District of California since 1998.
Career
Matz was born in Brooklyn, New York. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Columbia University in 1965 and his J.D. from Harvard Law School in 1968. Matz clerked for Judge Morris E. Lasker of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. He was in private practice in New York City from 1969 to 1970.
Matz moved to California and was in private practice in Los Angeles with Hughes Hubbard & Reed from 1972 to 1974. He served as Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California from 1974 to 1978, and was chief of the Special Prosecutions Unit from 1977 to 1978, when he left the Attorney General's office to return to Hughes Hubbard as a partner.
President Bill Clinton nominated Matz to the United States District Court for the Central District of California on October 20, 1997, to a seat vacated by Harry L. Hupp. He was unanimously confirmed by the Senate on June 26, 1998.
Famous rulings
- Judge Matz presided over the first legal challenge to the United States Government's treatment of Guantanamo Bay detainees, in a petition brought by a civil rights group seeking habeas corpus for the detainees.
- Matz was the judge in the copyright law case Perfect 10 v. Google, Inc.. In the case, Perfect 10 sued Google for making digitally available copyrighted content that it owned in the form of thumbnail-sized reproductions as part of Google's Google Books initiative. Matz rejected Google's fair use claim, which marked a reversal from the Kelly v. Arriba Soft Corporation case.
Sources
- A. Howard Matz at the Biographical Directory of Federal Judges, a publication of the Federal Judicial Center.