Jacqueline Scott Corley
United States District Judge for the Northern District of California
Jacqueline Scott Corley is a United States district judge for the Northern District of California, serving since March 2022. She was previously a magistrate judge in the same district from 2011 to 2022. Born in 1966 in Long Beach, California, she earned a B.A. with high distinction from UC Berkeley and a J.D. magna cum laude from Harvard Law School, where she served as an editor of the Harvard Law Review.
After law school, Corley clerked for Judge Robert E. Keeton in Massachusetts. She then worked as a litigation associate at Goodwin Procter and Coblentz, Patch, Duffy & Bass, and served as a trial attorney in the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice. For eleven years she was a career law clerk to Judge Charles R. Breyer of the Northern District of California before becoming a partner at Kerr & Wagstaffe LLP.
As a district judge, Corley gained national attention for denying the Federal Trade Commission's motion to block Microsoft's $68.7 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard. She has also presided over cases involving California tribal gaming rights and election prediction markets like Kalshi.