-Courtesy photo
By Jennifer Schlueter
Last Monday, Leondra Kruger was unanimously approved as the youngest justice of the California Supreme Court in almost a century. The 38-year old had been nominated by Governor Jerry Brown in November, and will be sworn into office by him on January 5, along with Mariano-Florentino Cuellar, who was confirmed as justice in August. Cuellar will replace retiring Justice Marvin Baxtor and Kruger will fill Justice Joyce Kennard’s seat, who had retired in April.
Kruger was appointed by California Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye; Attorney General Kamala Harris; and Joan Dempsey Klein, “presiding justice of the second appellate district division three,” who rated her “‘exceptionally well-qualified,’ [which is] the highest ranking a judicial candidate can receive,” according to Courthouse News. Patch.com quoted former Assistant U.S. Solicitor General Benjamin Horwich, who had worked with Kruger: “She listens, she thinks, she listens, she thinks and then she listens some more.”
Cantil-Sakauye, chair of the San Francisco-based court, “called Kruger’s credentials ‘truly stellar,'” according the website. Following an undergraduate degree from Harvard University and a law degree from Yale University, Kruger worked as an assistant law professor at the University of Chicago, and practiced privately. The website also reported that she then went to Washington, D.C., where she became “assistant to the U.S. solicitor general and acting principal deputy solicitor general,” and later deputy assistant attorney general in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel.
Kruger was born and raised in Glendale; however, has never practiced law in California nor been a judge. Thus, Cantil-Sakauye questioned Kruger about these two lacking fields to which Kruger answered that her work with the Justice Department has exposed her to a variety of legal principles and that she hopes to continue learning and “draw on the expertise of her colleagues on the court,” as Patch notes.
According to the LA Times, Kruger told California Attorney General Kamala Harris that she was excited “to have the opportunity to come back home” to California. “It is where I was born and raised and where my family still lives,” she added.
On the seven member court, Kruger will be one of three Democrats. Additionally, she will be the only African American member. Her colleague Cuellar, a law Professor at Stanford University, who also went to Harvard and Yale, will be the only Latino justice. He grew up in a border town in Mexico and, according to several sources, legally walked across the border every day to attend school on a scholarship in Texas. After his father was granted green cards, Cuellar became a citizen in 1994.
