Come next year, California may see its first immigrant Latino justice serving on the State’s highest court.
Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, who was nominated to the California Supreme Court by Gov. Jerry Brown to replace the retiring Justice Marvin Baxter, was confirmed for the position on Aug. 28 by the Commission of Judicial Appointments.
But before taking Baxter’s seat—who will step off the bench on Jan. 4, 2015— “Tino” Cuéllar will have to be approved by voters in November. At his public hearing last month, no one opposed the 41-year-old Stanford University law professor.
Born in the town of Matamoros, Mexico, the border kid would routinely cross the bridge on foot into Brownsville, Texas with his little brother Maximo to attend grade school. When Cuéllar reached high school, his parents Alfredo and Yolanda relocated the family to California, swapping one border town for another in Calexico, just north of Mexicali, Mexico. After graduating from Calexico High School, Cuéllar earned his A.B. at Harvard before getting his J.D. from Yale Law School and Ph.D. in political science from Stanford. An expert in various forms of law and the director of Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, he received the highest rating of “exceptionally well-qualified” from the state bar evaluating panel.