Susan Agid To Join State Court Of Appeals -- Two Others Named To Superior Court

Gov. Booth Gardner yesterday appointed King County Superior Court Judge Susan Agid, 49, a specialist in land use and environmental law, to the state Court of Appeals in Seattle.

Agid will succeed Judge Robert Winsor, who resigned to hear cases for a private judging firm.

The governor's judicial ``Christmas presents'' included naming two other Seattleites, Commissioner Larry A. Jordan of the State Court of Appeals and attorney Sally Phillips Pasette, to the King County Superior Court.

All of the appointments are effective Jan. 1 and all of the appointees must run for election in the fall.

Agid, whom Gardner appointed to the trial-court bench in 1986, will join two other women on the nine-member Division I of the appeals court - Judge Rosselle Pekelis and Faye Kennedy, an Everett attorney who was elected to the court in November.

Agid's other specialties include employment discrimination, a subject of two publications she has written.

A Chicago native whose father was a professional singer, Agid was reared in Charlottesville, Va. After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, she specialized in Sino-Soviet relations while doing postgraduate work from 1965-67 in political science at New York University.

Intending to be a teacher, she got a job in a legal-services agency.

``I took a trip to the University of California at Davis to help a law-school professor write a grant proposal,'' Agid recalled. ``While I was there, he said, `Why don't you stop wasting your time and go to law school?' ''

She did, receiving her law degree in 1975 from the Columbia University School of Law, where she was the Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar and a teaching fellow.

She later worked five years as a King County deputy prosecutor in the civil division, where most of her cases were in land use, environmental and labor law litigation. She was a principal in the law firm of Cohen, Keegan and Goeltz before going to the Superior Court post.

She and her husband, Robert D. Johns, a lawyer and partner in the law firm of Reed, McClure, have a daughter, Shana, 16.

Jordan, 45, who will move into Agid's spot on the Superior Court, has been a commissioner on the appeals court since 1975. As an instructor with the Pacific Area Review, a bar exam writing course, he has helped more than 750 students pass the bar exam.

Earlier he was a law clerk for Keith M. Callow, the outgoing chief justice of the state Supreme Court, and for Jerome Farris, now a judge on the Ninth Circuit of the United States Court of Appeals.

Born in Eugene, Ore., Jordan was an honor scholar at Alaska's Kenai High School before earning an economics degree at the University of Oregon. He received a law degree from the University of Washington Law School in 1971; later was a public defender and law clerk in Anchorage.

He and his wife, Roberta, a landscape gardener, have a son, Brian, 5, and a daughter, Rachel, 2.

Pasette, 45, will become the Superior Court's 46th judge in a new position created by the Legislature. She is a sole practitioner in general law with specialties that include family law and appellate advocacy.

Pasette has been appointed several times by the Superior Court to represent people where the issue is withdrawal of life-support systems. One of those was the historic case of Joseph Hamilin, a 43-year-old, mentally retarded ward of the state who was in a ``persistent vegetative state'' in the Harborview Medical Center for seven months before dying on Feb. 14, 1983.

Pasette also was the Seattle city hearing examiner who found in favor of Clara Fraser, a fired City Light employee, in a celebrated political-discrimination case. The finding was overturned by a jury but upheld in Superior Court.

The new judge also won the 1990 Pro Bono Service Award of the Seattle-King County Bar Association after being cited for outstanding work in a custody dispute case and for long service to indigents.

Born and reared in Southern California, she earned a degree in international relations from the University of California at Los Angeles and in 1969 was awarded a law degree from the university. Later she was in private practice as an associate for Roberts, Shefelman, Lawrence, Gay & Moch, now Foster, Pepper and Shefelman.

Pasette has had extensive experience as a neutral decision maker, serving as a pro tem judge in King County District Court and Superior Court and as an arbitrator for the King County Mandatory Arbitration office and the American Arbitrators Association and as a mediator for federal court and the Northwest Mediation Service.

Pasette and her husband, Dr. Arthur Pasette, a physician, are the parents of Daniel, 17, and Suzanne, 14.