2010—President Obama nominates Berkeley law professor Goodwin Liu to a Ninth Circuit seat. With his volatile mix of aggressive ideology and raw inexperience, the 39-year-old Liu is that rare nominee who threatens to make the laughingstock Ninth Circuit even more ridiculous. Liu openly embraces a freewheeling constitutional approach that yields a plethora of extreme left-wing results: among them, support for the invention of a federal constitutional right to same-sex marriage, pervasive and perpetual racial quotas, and judicial imposition (usually in an “interstitial” role) of an array of rights to social “welfare” goods, including education, shelter, subsistence, and health care.

In May 2011, Liu will abandon his Ninth Circuit nomination after Democrat Ben Nelson joins Senate Republicans in defeating a cloture vote. But later that year, California governor Jerry Brown will appoint Liu to the California supreme court. Liu follows in the line of three aggressive liberal activists whom Brown appointed to the state supreme court during his first stint as governor three decades ago, Rose Bird, Cruz Reynoso, and Joseph Grodin (all of whom were ousted by  voters in their 1986 retention election).