President Joe Biden said Tuesday he will tap former assistant federal defender Candace Jackson-Akiwumi to replace Justice Amy Coney Barrett on Chicago’s federal appeals court.

If confirmed by the U.S. Senate, Jackson-Akiwumi, 41, would be the only Black woman on the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Jackson-Akiwumi, a partner at Zuckerman Spaeder in Washington, D.C., is a 2005 graduate of Yale Law School and was a law clerk for U.S. District Judge David Coar in Chicago before joining the federal defender’s office here in 2010.

According to a bio released Tuesday by the White House, Jackson-Akiwumi represented more than 400 indigent clients in her 10 years as a federal defender, guiding defendants through every stage of the process, including investigation, trial, sen tencing and appeal.

In a post on the Yale Law School alumni page, Jackson-Akiwumi wrote about how she learned to develop a “thick skin” as a federal defender, where the odds of winning at trial can be “seemingly insurmountable” and doing justice for your client often means “shaving needless years and months off of a client’s sentence” or negotiating a plea deal where a defendant can get much-needed government help while incarcerated. “We do not win trials and contested hearings often, but we must keep trying,” she wrote. “There are numerous examples of the defense bar fighting an issue over and over and losing all of the time, only to have the Supreme Court or Congress finally weigh in and right a wrong that the defense bar has been pushing against for years.”

At her D.C. firm, Jackson-Akiwumi focuses on complex civil litigation, white-collar criminal defense and investigations, according to the White House bio. From 2007 to 2010, Jackson-Akiwumi was a litigation associate at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom in Chicago.

She received her undergraduate degree from Princeton University in 2000.

Jackson-Akiwumi’s nomination comes five months after Barrett left the 7th U.S. Circuit to join the U.S. Supreme Court. Currently, there are 10 men and four women on the court, which hears federal appeals from Illinois, Wisconsin and Indiana.

The nomination must first be approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee, headed by Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin, before moving to a confirmation vote by the full Senate.

Durbin issued a statement Tuesday welcoming the nomination and the rest of Biden’s slate. ened by the nomination of Candace Jackson-Akiwumi to an Illinois seat on the Seventh Circuit,” Durbin’s statement read. “As a former federal public defender, Ms. Jackson-Akiwumi brings with her an important perspective that is a valuable asset to the Judiciary. Once confirmed, Ms. Jackson-Akiwumi will bring much-needed demographic diversity back to the Seventh Circuit, which currently has no African-American judges.”