Havre High grad Holt serving as federal bankruptcy judge

A Havre High School graduate has made it to a top level in the legal system.

Whitman Holt was appointed by the Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals Nov. 1 as judge in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Eastern District of Washington.

Holt said he became interested in law while a Havre High student.

"I think I knew by the time I got to junior or senior year of high school that I was likely going to end up going to law school and being a lawyer," Holt said. "If you would've asked me at that time if I was going to be a bankruptcy lawyer or bankruptcy judge in central Washington, I would've said, 'I would have no idea how that would end up happening, but certainly some sort of involvement of the legal industry.'"

Holt will be one of two judges in the Eastern District. His chamber is in Yakima, Washington, and the other is in Spokane, Washington. 

He said he and the other bankruptcy judge for the district will split the bankruptcy cases that get filed in the Eastern District of Washington.

Holt said a bankruptcy judge has a 14-year term. He will hear cases under the United States bankruptcy code or relating to bankruptcy cases, sometimes in litigation that a company or person in bankruptcy has filed against a third party.

"Ninth Circuit judges are appointed by the president, kind of like the Supreme Court justices and subject to confirmation by the Senate, those judges then set up a process to pick bankruptcy judges for each state," Holt said. 

He said Ninth Circuit uses two rounds of interviews, the first with a local merit selection committee that is composed of residents of the state of Washington who look through the applications, select people to interview and then narrow the list of applicants down to three to five people. Those finalists are sent to be interviewed by court of appeals judges and another other bankruptcy judge who select the bankruptcy judge who is appointed after a full FBI background check, he added.

"There are four stages," he said. "The first is you fill out the application, then they (select) some of the people based on their paper application. The second stage is the first-round interview, then the second-round interview, then the FBI background check, and once all four of those hurdles have been cleared the person is officially appointed and takes the job."

Before being appointed in the District of Washington, Holt was an associate attorney with the law firm of Stutman, Treister and Glatt in Los Angeles, a release about his appointment said. He served as a Ninth Circuit lawyer representative for the Central District of California since 2017, and in 2015, was elected as a conferee of the National Bankruptcy Conference, an invitation-only organization.

Holt said he spent his early years in Montana City, then his family moved to Havre in 1988.

He added that he was very active on Havre High School speech and debate team and participated in the high school's competitive math team, did karate and was involved in Boy Scouts.

Holt graduated magna cum laude with a bachelor's degree in political science and philosophy from Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, in 2002, then earned his juris doctorate from Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 2005, graduating cum laude from that institution.

"I kind of fell into bankruptcy when I was in law school," he said. " ... I like the challenge of bankruptcy law. It's an interesting dynamic where - I like to use the analogy is that you're at dinner and everybody wants a piece of pie and there's just not enough pie to go around, so you have to figure out who gets how much pie and to do that in a fair and equitable way." 

" ... You get to learn a lot about different industries, so we'd be involved in a restaurant case and I'd learn about the restaurant business then we'd represent a failed bank that got seized by (Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation) and you'd learn about the banking business, or you'd do retail an, so I'd learn about how retail mall-based business works," he said. "You are constantly learning about different things in different areas of business and law."