She received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1969 in political science, cum laude, from the University of California, Berkeley, where she was a member of the Tower and Flame Honor Society.
In 1973, she received her Juris Doctor (fifth in her class) at the University of California, Davis School of Law.
[4] She was admitted to practice law in California in 1973 and began her legal career in the Civil Division of the Justice Department, where she served as a trial attorney from 1973 to 1976.
[3] In 2006, Restani sat by designation on a United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit panel hearing Bill Graham Archives v. Dorling Kindersley, Ltd., in which the plaintiff appealed a holding that the defendant's unlicensed use of several images of Grateful Dead concert posters in its coffee-table history of the band was fair use and not copyright infringement.
06-00184, Restani wrote, "Based on the ability of any user to alter Wikipedia, the court is skeptical of it as a consistently reliable source of information.