Towards the end of the trial, Senator Wilson called again, asking if he could submit Levi’s name to President George H. W. Bush as a nominee for a vacancy on the U.S. District Court of the Eastern District of California. “He said, ‘I recognize that you are only 38 and this may be too early for you, but the opportunity may not come your way again. You have a big decision to make.’” Levi decided to take the opportunity, and in 1990, he took the position of a judge he particularly admired, Judge Milton Schwartz, “who became one of my dearest friends on the court.”

“To become a federal judge at such an early point was a stretch. I found that I was up to the work, but that I had to work very hard to stay on top of it. Having two young boys at home kept me from losing perspective.”

An experienced prosecutor, Levi acknowledged his dearth of experience with civil cases when he took the bench. Making a promise to himself “never to pretend that I knew something that I really didn’t,” Levi says he found out how helpful the bar can be to the court.

“I knew I would be tested as a young judge on occasion, so I never pretended to be more knowledgeable than I was. I would be frank and say, ‘I don’t understand this. You’ll have to explain this to me.’ And I found the attorneys were delighted to help me” – an echo of the support he received from colleagues on becoming U.S. attorney.

“We are all responsible, in deep ways, for the success of the people around us,” he says. “Whatever success I had as a judge was largely due to the fact that people around me wanted to make the system work and wanted to have a judge who knew what was going on and was capable of making decisions. They helped me fulfill that role. If they had fought me or tried to take advantage of my inexperience, then undoubtedly I would not have been successful as a judge, but the system would have suffered as well. That was not the approach that lawyers took in my court, and I see a big lesson in that.”

Levi’s success in running an efficient and fair courtroom is corroborated by colleagues, counsel, and public opinion.

“David has a commanding presence in the courtroom and with his colleagues,” says Nowinski. “He is tremendously thoughtful and is a great problem solver.” O’Connell, who has appeared as counsel before Levi on a number of occasions, notes his even-tempered and polite style, as well as his thorough preparation. “He will give oral arguments with more frequency than a lot of judges, but when he does, he almost always has questions. He comes onto the bench prepared with some specifics that he wants some answers to. You don’t have a sense that he’s prejudged the issue, but that he knows where he might go and he’s going to put some questions to both sides to let him know if he can get there.”

“I have never seen an editorial like that in The Sacramento Bee, in which the paper said, ‘We are really concerned that Judge Levi is leaving,’ and went on and on about hoping that another judge will be able to do the kind of job he did,’” says Eastern District colleague and friend, Judge Frank Damrell.

Damrell’s reference is to a Jan. 12 editorial – one of two that followed the announcement of Levi’s move to Duke – that praised his carriage of a series of land-use cases in which he balanced Sacramento development plans in its “Natomas basin” area with the need to preserve habitat for endangered giant garter snakes and Swainson hawks. The piece lauded his “intelligent, consistent interpretation of the federal Endangered Species Act,” demand for funds and new plans for habitat preservation, and challenge to the government’s approval of significant growth in the area. “To get an editorial on a specific case is a remarkable indication of the respect with which he is held,” says Damrell.

Having dealt with a variety of environmental issues in a district that includes California’s fertile Central Valley, some of its fastest-growing cities, and such federal land treasures as Yosemite National Park, Levi articulates an approach that he has applied usefully in resolving many other civil cases: “They often aren’t about making a clear finding of right or wrong, or liability or no liability, but about problem-solving.”

Among his rulings that have been appealed to the Supreme Court, Levi mentions two of note. In the first, Saenz v. Roe, a majority opinion, authored by Justice John Paul Stevens, upheld Levi’s finding that California’s two-tiered welfare system, which offered reduced benefits to newcomers to the state, was unconstitutional. His ruling in The California Democratic Party v. Jones, which upheld the state’s introduction of a “blanket” primary election that permitted voters to go back and forth among different ballots, was overruled in a majority opinion written by Justice Scalia, though supported by Justice Stevens in dissent.