The Sacramento Bee editorial page likes Governor Brown’s choice of 38-year-old Leondra Kruger for the Supreme Court. Calling the appointment Brown’s “boldest move yet to infuse the court with new blood and high-powered diversity,” The Bee praises the “effort to invigorate the Supreme Court with a new generation of jurisprudence. The seven-member bench has long been older and more conservative-leaning than the state as a whole.”
The editorial also notes that the appointments of Goodwin Liu, Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, and Kruger will drop the court’s average age from 69 to 56, and it thanks the governor “for bestowing three wise new progressive minds on the state bench.”
On the other hand, San Francisco Chronicle commentator Marshall Kilduff is a bit less laudatory in “Jerry Brown’s judges, no experience necessary.” He questions whether Liu, Cuéllar, and Kruger should be on the Supreme Court even though “[n]one was ever a courtroom judge.” After Cuéllar’s nomination, a reporter asked the governor whether he was concerned that his nominee had no judicial experience, and Brown responded, “Neither did Earl Warren, nor Chief Justice Roger Traynor, nor did [William O.] Douglas, nor did [Hugo] Black.”
Kilduff also raises a geographical objection to Kruger, who hasn’t lived in California for some time. He says about Kruger, “Any state would be lucky to have her on its high court,” but he then asks, “Did the governor consider a resident Californian in a state with 36 million people?”
