As of november 2022, who is the current chief justice of the california supreme court?

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Oct. 10, 2022Updated: Oct. 18, 2022 10:33 a.m.

Voters will decide in November whether to retain California Supreme Court Justice Goodwin Liu, a former UC Berkeley law professor.

Voters will decide in November whether to retain California Supreme Court Justice Goodwin Liu, a former UC Berkeley law professor.

Courtesy Judicial Council of California / Courtesy Judicial Council of California

When California voters decide whether to retain four state Supreme Court justices in November, many of them might be learning the justices’ names for the first time.

It wasn’t always this way. In fact, once upon a time, the California Supreme Court was a political lightning rod.

Confirmation hearings for new justices in the 1970s and early 1980s were bitterly contested. Rulings by the seven-member court on death sentences, mandatory-imprisonment laws or consumers’ right to sue businesses typically came out 4-3, with strongly worded opinions that often appeared on front pages the next day.

And in 1986, for the first and only time since California began nonpartisan retention elections for its higher courts in 1934, three justices, including Chief Justice Rose Bird, were denied new terms by the voters, an election that abruptly swung the court’s majority from liberal to conservative.

Today, the court has fallen under the radar, at least as a political issue. While its majority has shifted from Republican to Democratic appointees in the past decade, 85% of its rulings during that period have been unanimous — even on contentious issues like cash bail, the employment-versus-contractor status of workers and Scott Peterson’s death sentence — compared with 36% during the same period for the U.S. Supreme Court, which has risen in public attention while falling in public esteem. No California justice seeking a new term has faced an opposition campaign in more than two decades.

“I doubt that there’s 1 in 10 people, maybe 1 in 100, who can name a justice of the California Supreme Court,” said former Justice Joseph Grodin.

Grodin, now 92, might have welcomed that anonymity during his brief tenure on the court, from his appointment by Gov. Jerry Brown in 1982 until he, Bird (the court’s first female member) and Justice Cruz Reynoso (its first Latino) were voted out of office less than four years later. The opposition campaign focused on the court’s reversals of death sentences — “Cast three votes for the death penalty” was the slogan — but was financed by businesses and agricultural organizations that had been exposed to new liability by the court’s rulings.

One of Grodin’s rulings from his tenure on the state appeals court, in 1981, limited employers’ authority to fire workers without good cause, but he was a relatively moderate member of the state’s high court who voted to uphold some death sentences and laws that his colleagues struck down.

“A lack of public controversy would have been good” for the court on which he served, Grodin said. Today, he said, “you have some differences on the court, but they’re not big differences like they are on the U.S. Supreme Court.”

The relative lack of public visibility has pluses and minuses, said the court’s retiring chief justice, Tani Cantil-Sakauye.

“I think we’re doing our job if we’re not on the front page,” but on the other hand, “I think the public suffers from not knowing the interpretation of laws governing their lives,” Cantil-Sakauye, 62, said in an interview after announcing that she would not seek another 12-year term. She has accepted a new job as chief executive of the Public Policy Institute of California, a nonprofit research organization.

Justice Patricia Guerrero is Gov. Gavin Newsom’s pick to become the California Supreme Court’s new chief justice. She will appear on the November ballot.

Justice Patricia Guerrero is Gov. Gavin Newsom’s pick to become the California Supreme Court’s new chief justice. She will appear on the November ballot.

Courtesy Judicial Council of California / Courtesy Judicial Council of California

Cantil-Sakauye was appointed in 2011 by Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, and her replacement by Gov. Gavin Newsom’s nominee, Patricia Guerrero — already the court’s first Latina justice — would give the court six Democratic appointees among its seven justices. To fill Guerrero’s seat, Newsom has nominated Kelli Evans, an Alameda Superior Court judge who would be the court’s second openly LGBT jurist. Guerrero will be on the November ballot for voter retention along with Justices Goodwin Liu, Martin Jenkins and Joshua Groban.

“With essentially a one-party state, I think there’s less drama,” Cantil-Sakauye said, referring to Democratic victories in virtually all statewide elections in the past two decades, Schwarzenegger being one of the few exceptions. But she said the court is still deciding “cases of great importance” on such issues as labor, the environment and criminal justice, including bail.

In one of the most significant labor cases in recent years, the court ruled in 2018 — in a unanimous decision by Cantil-Sakauye — that companies must classify their workers as employees, with the right to minimum wages, overtime and work expenses, rather than independent contractors unless a company can prove the workers are running their own businesses. In response, Uber and Lyft spent $200 million on a 2020 ballot measure, Proposition 22, that reclassified their drivers as contractors, but a judge has ruled the measure unconstitutional, and the case is on appeal.

Cantil-Sakauye has also been an outspoken opponent of cash bail, arguing that it unfairly penalizes poor defendants who are jailed while awaiting trial. When state lawmakers’ attempt to eliminate bail was rejected by the voters in a 2020 referendum sponsored by bail bond companies, the court stepped in six months later and required judges to consider a defendant’s ability to pay before setting bail, a ruling that has allowed many to be released without bail. The decision, also unanimous, was written by Justice Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar.

The death penalty, once California’s most bitterly contested legal issue, has also largely faded from public prominence.

After overturning nearly all death sentences it considered during Bird’s tenure, the court has upheld most of them since then, and the current court has followed that pattern. One 7-0 decision last year rejected arguments by Newsom — the first such filing by any California governor — that the state’s jury instructions in capital cases fail to protect defendants from arbitrary and unfair verdicts.

One strong indicator of changing times was the absence of a backlash in August 2020 when the court unanimously overturned Scott Peterson’s death sentence for the 2002 murders of his pregnant wife and her fetus, whose remains washed ashore in San Francisco Bay four months after they disappeared. The ruling — that the trial judge had wrongly dismissed jurors who opposed the death penalty, without asking if they could set their views aside — drew public attention, but did not prompt any campaigns to recall its author, Justice Leondra Kruger, or any of her colleagues. Peterson, who has been re-sentenced to life without parole, is now seeking a new murder trial.

Cuéllar, who left the court last November after six years to become president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told The Chronicle that the climate has changed.

“The California Supreme Court remains one of the most important courts in the country... but the state is less divided about the issues the court often resolves in its cases — such as criminal justice, tort liability and civil rights — than it was a generation ago,” he said. Within the court, he said, “sometimes disagreements can be substantial, but internal respect pervades the process.”

Apart from rulings on same-sex marriage and parental consent for abortion, in recent decades the California court “hasn’t addressed socially divisive issues.... And it tries to avoid such issues if it can, letting the question ‘percolate,’ or gain the Legislature’s attention,” said former Justice Kathryn Mickle Werdegar, who retired in 2017 after 23 years on the court. The U.S. Supreme Court, on the other hand, “seems in recent times to welcome such cases and sometimes reaches out to decide them,” she said, citing the 2010 Citizens United ruling, which allowed unlimited corporate spending on elections, an issue that did not arise until the case reached the high court.

Voters will decide in November whether to retain state Supreme Court justice Martin Jenkins, who joined the court in 2022 as its first openly gay justice.

Voters will decide in November whether to retain state Supreme Court justice Martin Jenkins, who joined the court in 2022 as its first openly gay justice.

Courtesy Judicial Council of California, Photographer / Courtesy Judicial Council of California

The U.S. Supreme Court also reached out on the abortion issue in June, using a challenge to Mississippi’s ban on the procedure after 15 weeks to declare that the Constitution provides no right to abortion, overturning its 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling. The California court, meanwhile, has left intact its 1981 ruling that recognized a right to abortion, including Medi-Cal abortions for poor women, under the state Constitution.

Werdegar played an important part in the state court’s ideological shift from right to center during her tenure, joining 4-3 rulings that rejected a parental-consent requirement for minors’ abortions and legalized same-sex marriage, and writing a 1996 decision that required business owners to follow civil rights laws regardless of their religious beliefs. The author of the parental-consent and marriage rulings, Chief Justice Ronald George, faced opposition from antiabortion groups in the 1998 election but breezed to retention with 75% of the vote and served 12 more years on the court. No California justice has encountered an opposition campaign since then.

George offered a similar assessment.

“Once the U.S. Supreme Court began questioning its own prior rulings, and overturning its landmark decision recognizing a woman’s right of choice, the public’s attention became riveted upon that court, especially because of the perceived link between judicial appointments and the actions and political pronouncements of members of the executive and legislative branches,” he said.

The apparent lack of public interest in California, however, also reflects “the failure of many of our grade schools and high schools to provide meaningful civics education,” George said. He noted that both he and Cantil-Sakauye, his successor, have held some of the court’s hearings in local communities, hosted teachers and students at the sessions and invited the youths to pose questions to the justices.

But overall, Californians should be relieved that their highest court has largely disappeared from the headlines, said David Carrillo, executive director of the California Constitution Center at UC Berkeley Law School.

“The absence of drama around the California court arguably shows that it better reflects California society, and the rancor on the U.S. Supreme Court and political arguments about reforming that court suggest that it is misaligned with society at large,” Carrillo said.

Corrections: A previous version of this article inaccurately stated Supreme Court nominee Kelli Evans’ current position. She is an Alameda County Superior Court judge. It also incorrectly stated Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar’s current title. He is president of of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Bob Egelko is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: Twitter: @BobEgelko

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