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THE WHITE HOUSE

Office of the Press Secretary

For Immediate Release March 29, 1996

            PRESIDENT CLINTON NOMINATES M. MARGARET MCKEOWN
                      TO THE U.S. COURT OF APPEALS

President Clinton today nominated M. Margaret McKeown to serve on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

McKeown, 44, is currently a partner at the Seattle firm of Perkins Coie, where she maintains a diverse civil litigation practice, handling numerous and complex cases in the fields of intellectual property, antitrust, government contracts and commercial law. Since becoming the first woman to be selected for partnership in the firm's eighty-year history, McKeown has been actively involved in firm management, serving for over eleven years on the firm's Executive Committee and, for the last five years, on the four-person Management Committee. Currently, she is the firm's Client Relations Partner and co-chair of the Antitrust, Trade Regulation and Intellectual Property Group. Although she has worked at Perkins Coie for virtually all of her professional career, she took a one-year sabbatical from 1980 to 1981 to serve in the prestigious White House Fellow program, working in the White House Office of Policy Development and as a Special Assistant to the Secretary of the Interior.

McKeown was named "Outstanding Lawyer" by the Seattle-King County Bar Association in 1992. She has received innumerable honors and awards and has been listed in "Best Lawyers in America," "Washington's Winningest Trial Lawyers" by the Washington Journal, "Top Players in Hi-Tech Intellectual Property" by the National Law Journal, "Who's Who in Professional Firms" by the Puget Sound Business Journal, and "Who's Who in America." Based on her expertise in international intellectual property issues, she was selected as a Japan Society Leadership Fellow. McKeown also has been active in community and professional organizations, including life-long participation in the Girl Scouts, where she served for over nine years on the National Board and is currently a Girl Scout troop leader.

McKeown earned her B.A. degree (Phi Beta Kappa) from the University of Wyoming and her J.D. degree from Georgetown University, where she was selected as an editor of the Journal of Law and Policy in International Business. McKeown and her husband, Peter Cowhey, have one child and reside in Seattle.

Upon confirmation, McKeown would become one of 28 judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which hears cases from Alaska, Arizona, California, Guam, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, the Northern Mariana Islands, Oregon and Washington.

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