More on Kennard and possible successors

The press on Justice Kennard's retirement is extensive. Here's a radio story. And the latest installment from The Recorder is Kennard Leaves Imprint on the Law—and a Seat to Fill. Names in The Reorder article are: Law school deans Kevin Johnson of UC–Davis and Rachel Moran of UCLA; Prof. Christopher David Ruiz Cameron; Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge Katherine Lucero; José Padilla, executive director of California Rural Legal Assistance; Solicitor General Edward DuMont; and Justices Maria Rivera, Marvin Jenkins, James Humes, Elena Duarte, and Miguel Marquez (and his sister, Riverside County Superior Court Judge Raquel Marquez).

[2/19/14 update: See Today's DJ for Hernán Vera's article, Diversity of Experience Key in Next Justice, which concludes:

What's needed now is another form of diversity. Let's call it "experiential diversity." The current court is composed of absolutely stellar justices, but they are former prosecutors, commercial litigators, academics, and appellate judges. I submit that the state Supreme Court of the 21st century needs a practicing attorney who has built a career representing working families so often excluded from the protection of our laws. The court should have a progressive who has seen, in her day-to-day representation of clients, the countless ways in which the formalism of the law fails to capture adequately the reality of people at the margins: the homeless struggling to survive, seniors and the disabled living on the edge of foreclosure and eviction, workers fighting to get paid, immigrants trying to create a better life for their kids. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. perhaps put it best, "The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience."

[2/21/14 update: See Today's DJ for an article by John Feder, president of Consumer Attorneys of California, New Justice Should Confront Barriers to Simple Fairness.]