Judge is ‘coming full circle’ to his job
As a child, Victor Rodriguez remembers helping his immigrant parents clean buildings in Livermore, including the local branch of the Alameda County Municipal Court. In the first and second grades, he recalls, he spent nonclassroom hours dusting courtrooms, emptying wastebaskets and cleaning the courthouse’s holding cell.
Next month, Rodriguez, now 42, will be sworn in as an Alameda County Superior Court judge.
“For me, it’s a particularly exciting feeling, like I’m coming full circle,” said Rodriguez, currently chief of staff for Justice Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar of the California Supreme Court, where he has worked as a staff attorney since 2006.
He sometimes encountered prosecutors and judges at the Livermore courthouse, he said, and “I remember having my parents tell me who these
people were, their role in accessing and giving justice to community members.”
Becoming a judge in that court system, he said, is “a testament to California and the opportunities that are available in this state.”
Rodriguez was one of 33 judicial appointees announced by Gov. Jerry Brown last Friday to Superior Courts throughout California. The new judges, already screened by a State Bar commission that provided confidential evaluations to the governor, will take office as soon as their positions are vacant — in Rodriguez’s case, when Judge Keith Fudenna retires Jan. 26. They will later come before the voters for six-year terms.
Other local appointees include attorney Richard Darwin to the San Francisco Superior Court; Virginia George of Martinez, a lawyer and former prosecutor, to the Contra Costa County Superior Court; and Danny Chou of Millbrae, an assistant Santa Clara County counsel, to the San Mateo County Superior Court. Superior Court judges make $200,042 a year.
Rodriguez attended the University of Southern California and the UC Berkeley law school, spent two years at the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, worked as a law clerk for a federal judge and then joined the staff of the state’s high court. He was a staff attorney for Justices Carlos Moreno, Goodwin Liu and Carol Corrigan before becoming chief of staff for Cuéllar in 2015.
He hasn’t forgotten where he came from. His parents, immigrants from Mexico, found work in the vineyards in Livermore and got a second job cleaning local buildings when he was 5 years old.
His mother, Carmen Rodriguez, later became a social worker for the county, and his father, Andres Rodriguez, worked as a custodian, mostly at local elementary schools. Both are now retired and live in Oceanside (San Diego County).