Governor Jerry Brown has nominated Stanford law professor Mariano-Florentino Cuellar to fill the most recent vacancy on the California Supreme Court created by the impending retirement of Justice Marvin Baxter. Cuellar is “a renowned scholar who has served two presidents and made significant contributions to both political science and law,” Brown said. “His vast knowledge and even temperament will – without question – add further luster to our highest court.”
Cuellar was born in Matamoros, Mexico. As a child he crossed the border each day to attend Catholic school in Brownsville, Texas, until he and his family relocated to California’s Imperial Valley when he was 14. After earning a bachelor’s degree from Harvard in 3 years (magna cum laude, 1993), he received a Master’s degree in political science from Stanford in 1996, followed by a law degree from Yale in 1997, and his Ph.D. in political science from Stanford in 2000. He then served as law clerk to Chief Judge Mary M. Schroeder of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
Since the culmination of his clerkship in 2001, Cuellar has been a professor at Stanford. He is currently the Stanley Morrison Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, as well as the Director of Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, where he is also a Senior Fellow. According to his faculty biography, his work at Stanford involves “the intersection of law, public policy, and political science.” His courses deal with issues of administrative law, regulation and bureaucracy, executive power, and national security.
Professor Cuellar’s tenure at Stanford has included governmental, as well as academic, endeavors. In fact, even before he assumed his faculty position at Stanford, he interrupted his Ph.D. program to serve as Senior Advisor to the Under Secretary (Enforcement) of the Treasury from 1997 to 1999, focusing on financial crime enforcement, terrorism financing countermeasures, immigration, and border security. In 2008 and 2009, he served as Co-Chair of the Immigration Policy Working Group for the Obama-Biden Transition Project, where he worked to formulate policies on immigration, borders, and refugees. In 2009 and 2010, he served as Special Assistant to the President for Justice and Regulatory Policy, leading the White House Domestic Policy Council’s work on criminal justice and drug policy; civil rights and liberties; immigration, borders, and refugees; public health and safety; rural development and agriculture policy; and regulatory reform.
From 2011 to 2013, Cuellar co-chaired the National Equity and Excellence Commission, instituted by Congress to seek ways to improve the performance of public schools. He is currently an Obama appointee to the Council of the Administrative Conference of the United States, which monitors the fairness and efficiency of federal regulatory programs. He is also a board member of the American Constitution Society, often described as a progressive counterpart to the conservative Federalist Society, and the Constitution Project, a non-profit think tank that builds bipartisan consensus on constitutional and legal issues.
Beyond Stanford, Professor Cuellar is associated with the Council on Foreign Relations, the American Bar Association, the La Raza Lawyers’ Association of California, and the National Hispanic Bar Association, among others. He is married to former Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge Lucy H. Koh, who is now a federal district court judge for the Northern District of California pursuant to an appointment by President Obama.
Because Cuellar has not served on the bench, glimpses of his prospective judicial outlook must be gleaned from his writings and his appearances in the media. A brief survey of his publications reflects an interest and expertise in national and international matters:
- Governing Security: The Hidden Origins of American Security Agencies, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013.
- “Securing” the Nation: Law, Politics, and Organization at the Federal Security Agency, 1939-1953, 76 U. Chi. L. Rev. 587 (2009) (arguing that American public law is driven by 1) how the executive branch defines national security and 2) how politicians compete to control public organizations that implement the law, and analyzing the intersection of those dynamics by investigation the history of the U.S. Federal Security Agency and drawing perspectives from separation of powers, organization theory, and the study of American political development.)
- The Political Economies of Criminal Justice, 75 U. Chi. L. Rev. 941 (2008) (responding to the proposition that politicians increasingly govern by framing social policy choices as criminal justice problems, and concluding that “reshaping the [crime-governance connection] to achieve more defensible social goals is a subtle enterprise. Sensible changes in criminal justice could almost certainly yield an acceptable social equilibrium less dependent on incarceration.”)
- Auditing Executive Discretion, 82 Notre Dame L. Rev. 227 (2006) (proposing an audit framework similar to “sample adjudication of class action” in lieu of the deferential or non-existent judicial review of executive decision-making and reaching 3 conclusions: “(1) Judicial review fails to constrain a broad range of discretionary executive decisions subject to mistakes or malfeasance. (2) The limitations of traditional judicial review do not imply that discretionary executive branch decisions should be immune from some form of review. (3) Arguments for broad executive discretion are often radically underdeveloped and fail to withstand scrutiny.”)
- The International Criminal Court and the Political Economy of Antitreaty Discourse, 55 Stanford L. Rev. 1597 (May 2003) (arguing that the United States objects to the ICC on “process-oriented” grounds because a “focus on procedure sounds marginally more principled to international audiences than a brute realist assertion that American interests are best served by keeping unfettered control of military decisions.” “Yet this comes with costs: It elides the debate over the value of the brute realist position that American military power should be subject to few meaningful constraints and instead makes it look like the most important question is about the procedural shortcomings of a court that is precisely meant to address the arbitrariness in international criminal justice that critics use to assail it.”)
Cuellar’s appearances in the media have often revolved around his role in shaping the Obama Administration’s immigration policy. His appointment to President Obama’s Immigration Policy Working Group was interpreted by experts as confirmation that President Obama was committed to comprehensive immigration reform. Cuellar observed earlier this year that such reform “is more likely now than it has been in decades.”
Cuellar’s own experience with immigration shapes his views on the subject now. He told The Stanford Daily last year that “when you grow up on the border, you realize that a legal demarcation has such a huge effect in distinguishing one country from another, for example, and the whole structure of law shapes who’s a citizen and therefore who counts in one society for another.” He recounted to Stanford Magazine being stopped by a law enforcement agent while jogging along the border in Calexico when he was 16, and being asked to provide his papers. He described the encounter as reflecting the “duality” of law enforcement, whose role is to protect, yet who can also spark fear in the community it polices. He acknowledges, though, that moving to the U.S. with a green card gave him “a clear sense that even the very imperfect country I was joining was an extraordinary place.”
Cuellar has also spoken out about “the problem of staggering education inequity.” “Our nation’s stated commitments to academic excellence,” he has written, “are often eloquent but, without more, an insufficient response to challenges at home and globally.” He has also criticized leaders who “decry but tolerate disparities in student outcomes that are not only unfair, but socially and economically dangerous.”
Pervading his opinions on these and other topics, however, is a fundamental realism. He describes the core of all his research efforts as “trying to look at how societies and legal systems and organizations take on problems that are so difficult to solve that nobody can really expect that they’re likely to be completely solved – ever.” His conclusion: “The world is as messy and complicated as it is beautiful and full of possibility.” As a result, says Hoover Institution Senior Fellow Abraham Sofaer, Cuellar is “not an ideologue,” but is “interested in … practical solutions.” According to Sofaer, a legal adviser to the U.S. Department of State during Ronald Reagan’s and George H.W. Bush’s presidencies, he and Cuellar “could serve in the same administration.”
Justice Marvin Baxter, whose position Cuellar has been nominated to fill, is widely regarded as the court’s most conservative justice. On the other hand, Cuellar was described by Hank Greely, another law professor at Stanford, as “certainly to the left of the middle of the American political spectrum.” Greely qualified his description, however, by noting that Cuellar is “fundamentally a pragmatist.” Thus, while Cuellar’s nomination will likely pull the overall outlook of the Court leftward, its new ideological center may be more moderate than Cuellar’s bona fides might indicate. Moreover, Governor Brown’s second consecutive appointment to the state’s highest bench of an academic with no judicial experience (former U.C. Berkley law professor Goodwin Liu was the first) suggests the Court’s new makeup will include a willingness to approach issues from a fresh perspective and, at any rate, an intellectual bent.
Before Cuellar can take his place on the state’s highest bench, his nomination must be approved by California’s Commission on Judicial Appointments, and by the electorate on the upcoming November ballot.
Image courtesy of Flickr by Lauren Mitchell (no changes).
