Goodwin Liu

Professional Profile

Associate Justice Goodwin Liu was nominated to the high court in 2011 by then-Gov. Jerry Brown, and has won one retention election. Now, he’s up for another term. Liu, a former law professor and associate law school dean at the UC Berkeley School of Law, specializes in constitutional, education law and policy and diversity in the legal profession. Liu once clerked for the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

In 2011, he was tapped for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, but then-President Barack Obama withdrew Liu’s nomination after Senate Republicans filibustered. According to news reports at the time, many senators took issue with Liu’s 2006 testimony against the Supreme Court nomination of Samuel Alito. Liu said that Alito’s pro-law enforcement record “envisions an America where police may shoot and kill an unarmed boy to stop him from running away with a stolen purse…. This is not the America we know. Nor is it the America we aspire to be.”

A son of Taiwanese immigrants, Liu grew up in Sacramento, where he attended Rio Americano High School. Liu is a graduate of Stanford University, where he earned a degree in biology. He attended Oxford University on a Rhodes Scholarship, and he received his law degree from Yale Law School.