Christine Marie Arguello

Judge Christine Marie Arguello was born in rural Colorado to a large and very poor family and steeped in a culture where women had subservient positions, Judge Arguello decided at a very young age that education would be the key to breaking those cultural norms. At age 13, she decided she was going to become a lawyer and she was going to obtain her law degree from Harvard.

In 2008, Judge Arguello became the first Hispanic United States District Court Judge for the District of Colorado, attaining with that appointment another of the historic firsts that mark her distinguished legal career. She was the first Latina from Colorado to be admitted to Harvard University School of Law. She was the first Hispanic to be promoted to partner at one of the then “big four” law firms in Colorado and the first Latina to be tenured and promoted to full professor at University of Kansas School of Law. Arguello is respected for her expertise in the Federal Rules of Evidence and is the co-author of a leading casebook on evidence, Evidence: The Objection Method. In 2000, Judge Arguello became the first Hispanic Chief Deputy Attorney General for Colorado. Her service as Senior Managing Counsel at University of Colorado Boulder, her undergraduate alma mater, was interrupted by her appointment to the United States District Court bench, where she works hard to meet the Court’s mission of serving the public by providing a fair and impartial forum that ensures equal access to justice in accordance with the rule of law, protects rights and liberties of all persons, and resolves cases in a timely and efficient manner.

Judge Arguello’s passion is mentoring students and young adults and assisting them in becoming the next generation of leaders. In 2014, Judge Arguello created Law School…Yes We Can (LSYWC), a law school pipeline mentoring program in which college students interested in becoming lawyers are paired with three mentors, provided with skill-building and exposure programming, and awarded scholarships to pay for an intensive LSAT preparation course. The end goal of LSYWC is to level the playing field and assist the students in gaining acceptance into the law school of their choice. For more information on the program, please visit http://lawschoolyeswecan.org/.

Judge Arguello has received numerous honors and awards for the many glass ceilings she has shattered and for the work she has done to provide guidance and inspiration to those who wish to enter  the legal profession. In addition to being inducted into the Colorado Women’s Hall of Fame in 2014, she was inducted into the Colorado Latino Hall of Fame in 2019. Judge Arguello has also received the Judge Wiley Daniel Lifetime Achievement Award from the Center for Legal Inclusiveness (2021), the Outstanding Latina Judge of the Year Award from the Hispanic National Bar Association (2015), and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Colorado Hispanic Bar Association (2015).

In Her Words