SAN FRANCISCO — Under political pressure to appoint a Latino to the California Supreme Court, Gov. Jerry Brown delivered Tuesday, nominating Stanford scholar Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, a native of a Mexican border town who has grappled with immigration policy in senior posts of the U.S. government.
Cuéllar, 41, is the director of a Stanford University research center on cross-border issues and advised President Barack Obama on immigration before and after his 2008 election. He’s the second consecutive Brown high court appointee from academia, following Justice Goodwin Liu from Berkeley Law, and the third in a row from Brown’s law school alma mater, Yale, going back to Joseph Grodin from Brown’s first gubernatorial administration.
