The Appointment of Goodwin Liu
By Peter Schrag
Despite the complaints of conservatives, Gov. Jerry Brown couldn’t have chosen a better state Supreme Court nominee than Goodwin Liu. For California schoolchildren and their parents it may turn out to be particularly good news.
The 40-year-old Liu, now a professor of constitutional law at Berkeley, was a Rhodes Scholar, clerked for a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, and has a record of pioneering legal scholarship that would bring distinction to someone twice his age.
But beyond that, Liu has a deep understanding of the inequities in school finance; of the history of civil rights going back to the Civil War, and of constitutional law in general. As two major law suits challenging California’s unfair and inefficient school finance system wind their way through the state’s judicial system and eventually, one assumes, to the Supreme Court, no judge will be better qualified to deal with their legal and administrative complexities.