On December 19, 2013, President Barack Obama nominated Chutkan to serve as a United States District Judge of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, to a new seat created pursuant to 104 Stat. 5089, on July 1, 2013. She received a hearing before the United States Senate Judiciary Committee on February 25, 2014. On March 27, 2014, her nomination was reported out of committee by voice vote. On June 4, 2014, the United States Senate voted in favor of final confirmation by a vote of 95–0. She received her judicial commission on June 5, 2014.
Notable cases
In February 2017, Public.Resource.Org was sued by the American Society for Testing and Materials, the National Fire Protection Association, the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air Conditioning Engineers, and other entities for scanning and making available building codes and fire codes which these organizations consider their copyrighted property. Chutkan ruled against Public.Resource.Org, ordering all of the standards to be deleted from the Internet. In summer 2017 Chutkan presided over the Imran Awan and Hina Alvi fraud case. In Garza v. Hargan, Chutkan ordered the Office of Refugee Resettlement to allow a girl in its care to have an abortion. That ruling was vacated by a panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, reinstated by the full en banc D.C. Circuit, and ultimately mooted by the U.S. Supreme Court. In March 2018, Chutkan certified a class action and ordered the government to provide access to abortions to all girls in ORR's custody. On June 8, 2018, Chutkan blocked until June 20 the release in Syrian Democratic Forces-controlled territory of a dual-nationality Saudi-American citizen alleged to have joined ISIL. The man, who is now held for nine months in Iraq, was planned to be released by the U.S. military – with a new cell phone, some food and water and $4,210 in cash, and his Professional Association of Diving Instructors identification card, as soon as the next day. On March 7, 2019, Chutkan ruled that U.S. Secretary of EducationBetsy DeVos illegally delayed the implementation of the "Equity in IDEA" regulations. These regulations updated how states calculate racial disparities in the identification of children as being eligible for special education, the placement of children in restrictive classroom settings, and the use exclusionary discipline. Chutkan also ruled that the U.S. Department of Education violated the law concerning the spread of regulations by neglecting to provide a "reasoned explanation" for the delay, and failing to account for the costs that child, parents, and society would bear. On April 26, 2019, Chutkan sentenced Maria Butina to 18 months in prison for conspiring to be an unregistered agent of the Russian government in the United States. On November 20, 2019, Chutkan issued a preliminary injunction against the U.S. Department of Justice, finding that federal inmates sentenced to death were likely to succeed in arguing that the federal government's new lethal injection procedure--which uses a single drug, pentobarbital, rather than the three-drug combination previously in place--“exceeds statutory authority" under the Federal Death Penalty Act. Chutkan's order was later reversed by a divided panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, and the case is currently pending before the U.S. Supreme Court.
