It is 600 miles from the sunbaked city of Imperial, where Justice Patricia Guerrero grew up, to McCallister Street in downtown San Francisco where the state Supreme Court building stands.
The mileage is one way to measure the distance that Guerrero has traveled in her life. The daughter of Mexican immigrants whose father was a farmworker in the fields of Imperial County, Guerrero — valedictorian of her class at Imperial High School, graduate of Berkeley and Stanford, top-tier lawyer at a powerhouse firm — is poised to make history as the state’s next chief justice, and its first Latina.
On Friday, after a largely ceremonial 80-minute hearing, Guerrero was confirmed by the Commission on Judicial Appointments as the next chief justice. She will appear on the November ballot and if voters elect her she will replace current Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye who is retiring.
Her ascent to become the leader of the court caps not only an inspiring personal story, but also a remarkably rapid rise through the state judiciary for the 50-year-old Guerrero.
A little more than nine years ago, Guerrero was plucked by Gov. Jerry Brown from a successful position as a partner at the powerhouse law firm Latham and Watkins in San Diego to take a seat on the San Diego Superior Court.
Just four years later she was named to the Fourth District Court of Appeal in downtown San Diego, and in March — after less than five years on the appellate court — Gov. Gavin Newsom named her to the Supreme Court as an associate justice, replacing Mariano-Florentino Cuellar.
Five months later he tapped her to replace Cantil-Sakauye, who decided not to seek retention to a second 12-year term and will step down at the end of the year.
Under Cantil-Sakauye, the court was highly consensus-driven, with more than 80 percent of the opinions decided unanimously.
Expect more of the same, said David A. Carrillo, executive director of the California Constitution Center at Berkeley Law who studies the state Supreme Court.
“Given what we know about Justice Guerrero, the current court’s consensus culture, and where things stand in California, we should not expect dramatic change on the court,” he said in an email. “The 29th chief justice will assume command of a relatively stable and decently-funded judicial branch, and looks set to chart a course of continuity.”
No sweeping doctrines
Guerrero comes to the court with notably less judicial experience than her predecessors.
Cantil-Sakauye had been a judge for 20 years, including five on the Third District Court of Appeals in Sacramento, before Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger named her chief justice in 2010.
She replaced Chief Justice Ronald George, who had been a judge for 19 years before being named an associate justice of the Supreme Court in 1991 and later elevated to its leader in 1996.
The San Diego Union-Tribune reviewed scores of published opinions Guerrero authored or ed in while on the San Diego appeals court. She did not create any sweeping new legal doctrines in the opinions she wrote, and there was no obvious pattern, such as always ruling for prosecutors or siding with plaintiffs.
A spokesman for the Judicial Council said Guerrero was declining requests for interviews until after the confirmation hearing.
While Carrillo said Guerrero’s work put her pretty squarely in the mainstream of appellate court justices, some decisions stand out. In perhaps her most far-reaching decision, in 2020 Guerrero wrote an opinion holding e-commerce giant Amazon strictly liable under state law for selling defective products.
The case centered on a consumer who purchased a replacement laptop battery from a third-party seller on Amazon, then was burned when the battery blew up several months later. The buyer sued Amazon, which contended it could not be liable because the company did not manufacture, sell or distribute the product.
A San Diego Superior Court judge agreed with the company and threw out the suit. But Guerrero wrote a unanimous opinion reversing that decision. She wrote that the company was strictly liable under state consumer laws because it was a “direct link” in the sale of the product and acted “as a powerful intermediary between the third party seller and the consumer.”
She also rejected the company’s argument that it was shielded under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which companies like Facebook and Twitter have used to protect themselves from suits. The section says a digital platform isn’t liable for the content it hosts. Amazon, like other e-commerce sites, claimed that protection by saying it did not write the product description of the faulty battery and could not be held liable.
‘Pro-consumer’ decision
Amazon appealed Guerrero’s ruling but the state Supreme Court declined to take the case. That meant hers was one of the first rulings in the country that said Amazon could be held responsible for its products, said Jeremy Robinson of the San Diego law firm CaseyGerry, who represented the woman.
“It’s a very significant ruling,” he said. “It has been relied on now in other cases and written up in law review articles. This is very much a pro consumer decision.”
If there is a through line in her opinions, it is that Guerrero adheres closely to a law as it was written, and applies it only as far as needed to resolve a case.
For instance, in January Guerrero ruled in favor of a woman who had sued the San Diego Metropolitan Transit System for injuries she suffered when she fell on a bus. The suit had been thrown out on a technicality: the woman had filed her lawsuit more than six months after the agency denied her required istrative government claim.
Guerrero concluded, however, that the notice denying the claim sent by MTS was defective. It did not include language required under state law advising the woman she could consult a lawyer. The suit was revived and is ongoing, said Shawn Huston the lawyer for the injured woman.
He said the decision benefitted individuals, who for years often had been blocked from suing government agencies because they did not comply with every technical aspect of filing a claim. “That’s really damaging to consumers and plaintiffs who want their day in court,” he said. “Justice Guerrero is saying, to the extent we can, to the degree we can, let’s play fair.”
In 2019, she wrote an opinion in a criminal case that illustrates again how she interprets law and applies it only as far as needed. Guerrero said that private crime labs that assist prosecutors on a case can be considered part of the “prosecution team,” and their work therefore subject to discovery by defense lawyers.
In the same ruling, however, she said that two government expert witnesses could not be considered part of the prosecution team, and were not subject to discovery rules.
The difference: the private labs and the work they did for the prosecution were “not distinguishable from the government crime laboratories that are now universally seen as part of the prosecution team.” But the two experts were not so closely involved in the actual investigation of the murder. She concluded they were “ordinary expert witnesses, not of the prosecution team. There is no evidence they stepped outside that role.”
The ruling was “an important step forward in this area of the law,” said Christina Spaulding of the Office of the State Public Defender, which filed the case. Many small and medium counties use private labs for forensic work, so the ruling could have broader application.
But Spaulding said her office disagreed with the reasoning on the expert witnesses and unsuccessfully asked the Supreme Court to review the ruling.
Criminal cases
Much of Guerrero’s work dealt with criminal cases, which is common for justices on the appellate courts who — unlike judges on the Supreme Court— do not choose which cases they will consider. Appellate courts generally have to decide any appeal filed with them, and since many convictions are appealed, criminal cases make up a substantial portion of the workload.
Guerrero’s rulings here dealt largely with sentencing issues, issibility of evidence and the like. In 2021 she wrote an opinion that an inmate who was serving a sentence for both violent and non-violent offenses was not entitled to early parole. A change in state law said people serving nonviolent sentences could be paroled early, but Guerrero ruled that law did not allow someone with both kinds of convictions to get out early — a ruling that was upheld by the Supreme Court.
In 2020 she wrote an opinion reversing a trial court’s ruling that threw out a National City robbery and carjacking case against several men who claimed their constitutional rights were violated. The defendants said the San Diego County District Attorney’s office should have compelled the federal DEA to turn over information it had, which they said could have helped their case.
Guerrero ruled that the prosecutor was not obligated to do so, and dismissing the charges was unwarranted.
In a 2019 case from Riverside County, she threw out the conviction and 15-year sentence in a child molestation case. She found that a prosecutor’s comments to the jury attacking the defense lawyer amounted to misconduct. She also found the defendant’s lawyer provided inadequate representation for not objecting.
While experts do not expect her judicial philosophy will dramatically shift the court’s rulings, how she performs in the other part of her job remains to be seen.
Guerrero will become the leader not only of the seven-member court, but also the chief executive of the sprawling state court system, with close to 2,200 trial and appellate court justices in 58 counties, with a budget of $5 billion.
