Retiring justice says women on bench foster stability
In her last annual meeting with reporters, California Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye contrasted the U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday with the state’s high court, which is more united and less involved in politics — and, incidentally, also has four women among its seven justices.
When Gov. Gavin Newsom nominated then-Appeals Court Justice Patricia Guerrero in February to succeed Justice Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, who had left to become president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, “I said to him, ‘Thanks for restoring our female majority,’ ” said Cantil-Sakauye, who is retiring in January after 12 years on the court and will become chief executive of the Public Policy Institute of California.
Newsom named Guerrero, the court’s first Latina justice, to succeed Cantil-Sakauye, and nominated Kelli Evans, a Superior Court judge in Alameda County, to Guerrero’s former seat, maintaining the court’s female majority.
“It doesn’t affect our deliberations or analyses, but it has a different kind of collegiality around the table when you have four females,” Cantil-Sakauye said at the hour-long questionand-answer session she has held every December. On state courts around the nation, she said, “we’re trying to get more women into the pipeline, but (other) states have nowhere near the number of California’s (court) for gender diversity, and age diversity, and ethnic, cultural diversity.”
The current court has two Black justices, two Asian-Americans, one LGBT justice — Evans will be the second — and only one white man, Justice Joshua Groban.
The U.S. Supreme Court’s nine members include five men and six white justices.
With a 6-3 majority of Republican appointees, it has also been sharply divided in major cases — repealing the right to abortion it had declared in 1973, expanding the right to carry guns in public, overturning parts of the Voting Rights Act — while the California Supreme Court has voted unanimously in more than 80% of its cases in recent years.
Those have included such contentious decisions as requiring judges to consider a defendant’s financial status before setting bail, overturning Scott Peterson’s death sentence while upholding his convictions for murdering his pregnant wife and her 8-month-old fetus, and allowing then-President Donald Trump to appear on California’s primary ballot in 2020 despite a state law requiring candidates to disclose their tax returns.
While less publicly prominent than the nation’s high court, “we handle more of a variety of cases that really affect people’s lives,” on issues involving individual rights and appeals in civil and criminal cases, said Cantil-Sakauye, who was appointed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and is one of two Republican appointees on the current court.
“We want now, more than ever, to be distinct from federal courts, from the United States Supreme Court,” she said. “We’re not political. We can’t be political. If we’re drawn into that we’re sure to be tainted.”
One difference, Cantil-Sakauye said, is that the state court aims for “stability of rulings, so you know it’s not going to change in a few years when a new justice comes along.”
And while not expressly calling for term limits for the U.S. Supreme Court, Cantil-Sakauye said California’s laws setting 12year terms for its Supreme Court and appellate justices, and six-year terms for trial judges, “keeps judges and justices engaged with their community,” and encourages them to keep “going out to the community to speak about what courts do and why they do it . ... When you don’t have to worry about a term or election, then I don’t know that you care a whole lot about your approval rating or how the public, writ large, understands a news article about your opinion.”
Wednesday’s meeting with reporters provided another contrast with the U.S. Supreme Court, whose justices have little contact with the news media, and which bars cameras at its hearings, though it has allowed live audio coverage during the pandemic.
California’s chief justices and some of their colleagues have been accessible to reporters, and the court live-streams its public hearings.