In City Journal, Mark Pulliam objects to California governor Jerry Brown’s selection of 38-year-old Leondra Kruger for a seat on the California supreme court. Kruger has never practiced law in California and “is plainly too inexperienced to serve on California’s Supreme Court.”
More broadly, Pulliam discerns in Kruger and in Brown’s previous supreme court selections—“fellow Yale law grads Goodwin Liu and Mariano-Florentino Cuellar”—a troubling pattern that may make the “Rose Bird era of unrestrained activism” (for which Brown was responsible in his previous stint as governor from 1975 to 1983) “seem tame in hindsight”:
Once upon a time, Americans held seasoned judges and legal practitioners in esteem. Lewis Powell, Henry Friendly, Louis Brandeis, and Charles Evan Hughes were all accomplished lawyers in private practice before they served on the bench. Representing clients in the real world tends to instill an appreciation for the rule of law. Today, by contrast, a Yale law degree, a prominent post in a Democratic presidential administration, and a desire to place one’s hands on the levers of judicial power are the tickets to a seat on the California Supreme Court.…
The vanguard of young, Ivy League-educated, activist-minded judges Brown is appointing to the California Supreme Court is not “diverse” at all. Sure, they represent different ethnicities and races, but they’re all Yalies and liberal Democrats, with no signs of respect for judicial restraint.
Longtime California power broker Willie L. Brown Jr. also raises questions about the selection of Kruger:
One thing Kruger has not been for many years is a California resident. She lives in Washington, D.C. She was admitted to the California State Bar in 2002, but she hasn’t been practicing in the state.
This has been pointed out to me by a number of African American lawyers, law school professors and judges in recent days, all of whom wonder why the governor had to go all the way to the East Coast to find a justice.
Were there no qualified African Americans in California?
Just asking.