Served: Friday, January 7th, 2011 to Present

Charlie Wiggins was elected to the Supreme Court in 2010. He was admitted to the Bar in 1976 and focused primarily on representing hundreds of clients in appeals, both civil and criminal, in the State Supreme Court, the State Court of Appeals, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, and once as co-counsel in the United States Supreme Court, in addition to trying cases in several different counties throughout Washington. He practiced with a small Seattle law firm at the time known as Edwards, Sieh, Wiggins & Hathaway. He served as a judge on Division Two of the Washington Court of Appeals, following which he established a small firm on Bainbridge Island handling exclusively appellate cases. He has also served as a pro tem superior court judge in a number of cases in King and Jefferson Counties and as a pro tem district court judge in Kitsap County.

The son of a career warrant officer, Justice Wiggins grew up in the Army and earned the Boy Scout Eagle Scout award. With the help of an R.O.T.C. scholarship, he attended Princeton University, where he graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa. He spent the next four years in the Army Military Intelligence Corps, leaving as a Captain. While in the Army, Justice Wiggins was able to attend night school, earning an M.B.A. The G.I. Bill helped him to attend Duke Law School, where he graduated in 1976.

While in private practice, Justice Wiggins was active on the Washington State Bar Rules Committee, which proposes rules to the Supreme Court, and served on the Disciplinary Board, making initial decisions on lawyer discipline. He has served on a number of task forces drafting and revising the rules that govern many aspects of law. He served as president-elect, president, and past president of the Washington Chapter of the American Judicature Society, working to help educate the public about judicial elections and to improve judicial elections generally. He worked with a coalition of lawyers, bar associations and government groups to establish the nonpartisan award-winning website votingforjudges.org. The Young Lawyers Section of the Washington State Bar Association gave Justice Wiggins their Professionalism Award in 2008.

[Source: Washington Courts, http://www.courts.wa.gov/, last visited January 12, 2011]