In June, San Francisco residents will vote on a rare contested race to determine which judge will fill Seat 15 of the Superior Court in the California Judicial Elections.
Richard Ulmer, the incumbent, faces a direct challenge from Michael Nava, a staff attorney working under California Superior Court Justice Carlos Moreno, at one point considered to be a leading candidate to replace retiring Justice David Souter on the U.S. Supreme Court. After working most of his career in the public sector, Nava has come to believe that the third branch of government should be held to a similar standard of transparency as the executive and legislature, advocating for more openness in the judiciary. Daniel Dean is also in that race.
El Tecolote had a chance to sit down and ask Nava how his background as the grandson of Mexican immigrants would bring perspective to the bench and to explain why he chose to challenge a sitting judge, an uncommon practice in the judiciary.
What qualifies you to run for the position of a superior court judge? What kind of experience do you have?
I graduated from Stanford in 1981 and have spent most of my career working for judges. I worked for a judge in (the) Los Angeles court of appeals. She was the first black woman to be appointed to the court of appeals. Now I work Justice Carlos Moreno who’s only the third Latino appointed to the California Supreme Court.
San Francisco, despite being very diverse as a city, has little diversity on the bench. Seventy percent of the judges are white. More than 50 percent of judges are male. Many of them have been appointed by republican governors over the last 30 years. So while the Board of Supervisors, for instance, is very diverse and represented by the community by people like David Campos and David Chu, the judiciary is not diverse and doesn’t really represent the communities that make up San Francisco.
What I learned working for Justice Woods was that the law is rarely black and white. Judges aren’t simply mechanically reading rules and applying them to facts. Usually there are at least two good answers to any legal question. What judges do is choose among the several options. All of them are legally defensible and the choices that judges make are really influenced by personal history. Where did they grow up in the social stratosphere, what are their values, and their political views in the broad sense of politics? Basically we hire judges to make judgments and the judgments they make are as much a matter of who they are as their understanding of the law. That’s why it makes a difference to have someone like Sonia Sotomayor on the Supreme Court because she represents the working class, person of color. That’s a perspective that’s helped form her world view and her values so when she looks at cases, that’s going to influence in some way how she comes down on a legal question. We just don’t have many people with that background on the courts and they tend to be upper-middle class white men who have a very narrow exposure to society. Which is not to say that upper middle class white men can’t be great judges. Of course they can, but we don’t want a judiciary that’s dominated by that sort of view point.
I graduated from Stanford and I could’ve gone and worked for a big law firm like most of my classmates. That’s what most people that have Stanford degrees do. They end up working for large firms or representing large corporations and end up making a lot of money. But (…) coming from a Mexican-American working class family and being the first in my family to go to college and law school, that didn’t appeal to me at all. I really knew from the very beginning that I wanted to use my law degree to provide a public service. Working for Justice Woods was an extension of that.
The most important thing she modeled for me was how to be a successful minority lawyer, how to navigate the white world without being bitter. She was very charming and persuasive and it was really interesting to watch her work in a world that was predominantly white and male.
How will you take further steps to have the judiciary represent the diverse community of San Francisco?
I’ve been talking to some people about this, especially the younger political activists in the city, and I really think that there should be an effort to identify and encourage and mentor younger lawyers who want to be judges, who are willing to run, and to support their efforts to do that.
We also need to educate voters in San Francisco about the judiciary is important and why it’s important that they pay attention to those races. It’s a long term project. Basically I want to be part of the effort that brings the judiciary back into our democracy instead of it being set apart as a private club.
California has a weird system where the governor appoints judges first and then the judges run for office later. (…) You know, a judge resigns or retires and then instead of (having) a special election to fill that position, the governor appoints someone. Then when the term for which the judge has been appointed expires, then the people get to vote. By that point, the judge has already been there for a while. That’s the situation with this guy I’m challenging.
He was appointed to replace a judge who retired, without any input from the public. He’s been there for ten months. Now he’s running for election but he’s running as the incumbent, right? So most voters don’t really understand that he’s only been there for ten months and they just see incumbent and assume he’s done this for a long time and decide to vote for him.
It’s completely the governor’s decision. It’s not transparent. We don’t know why he appoints certain people and why he doesn’t appoint other people. I tell people, electing a pope is a more transparent process than choosing judges in California.
I think if you talk with the legal community they would say this appointment process insulates judges from political influences. We don’t run as democrats or republicans. It’s a non-partisan race. So they say you don’t want judges having to run and to collect money and all this stuff. But in fact, the appointment process is just as political.
California has had a series of conservative governors who have not appointed minority lawyers to be judges, who have not appointed lesbian and gay lawyers to be judges, they’re very bad about appointing women so it’s just as political and ideological and on top of that, it’s in secret.
That is why, even in San Francisco, 70 percent of its judges are white in a city where self-identifying whites make up about 40 percent of the population and Asian-Americans are 36 percent and Latinos are somewhere between 15-to-20 percent.
Can you tell us about your family?
I’m the grandson of Mexican immigrants (who) came up from Mexico around 1920. They were refugees of the Mexican revolution in which a million Mexicans were killed between 1910 and 1920, a million more displaced, mostly to the United States (…). It was devastating though no one here knows about it. My grandparents were part of that Diaspora of people that came up to California to escape the ravages of civil war. They were farmers in Mexico, basically farm workers here and ended up in Sacramento because that’s where the crops were.
So I came from a family of cannery workers and laborers. We lived in a neighborhood of Sacramento that was one of the few areas where Mexicans were allowed to own property because of restricted covenant, which basically kept Mexicans and Black people from buying property in certain parts of Sacramento. It was probably the same for Japanese Americans to put it frankly because there was a pretty big Japanese American community in Sacramento and they tended to be localized in a particular area of the community.
My family was very poor and I was the first to go to college. I’m the only member of my family or my siblings that went to college. They’re all still in Sacramento and working—very blue collar. My mom still lives there on social security. So, yeah, you know a very humble family and I try to stay true to my roots.
The first few years, (my grandparents raised me) because my mother was a single mother. There weren’t too many books in my grandparents’ house, but they did, for some reason, have a set of encyclopedias. I learned to read very early on and when I was 7 or 8 I was just fascinated by these books so I just started reading them. Starting with “A”, all through my childhood into my adolescents I just read these encyclopedias. Which is why I know all these trivial and unrelated factoids. I was always just very precocious and from the very beginning I was always academically inclined and I loved to read. I spent most of my childhood with my nose in my book and it gave me great pleasure. It showed me that there was a bigger world than the one I was living in.
How did that lead to a career practicing law?
Like a lot of poor kids I was unconsciously looking for a role model. There weren’t that many where I grew up. (…) So my first sort of mentor or role model was Abraham Lincoln. Because he was a poor kid and got an education and did well. I think, initially, I wanted to be president, and then later I thought, well, he was first a lawyer so I think that’s where the initial idea to become a lawyer came in. From reading about Lincoln and also from watching this old TV law program called Perry Mason that my grandfather loved.
As far as being a writer, I’ve been writing since I was 8 years old and—I don’t know— that’s just sort of a gift. I started writing my first novel when I was studying for the Bar.