What Leondra Kruger, a Potential Nominee, Could Bring to the Supreme Court

SACRAMENTO — In 2014, when then-Governor Jerry Brown nominated Leondra R. Kruger to the California Supreme Court, the immediate reaction in her home state was: Leondra who?

She was just 38. While she was born and brought up in California, her career had been in Washington, D.C., as a government lawyer. A retired veteran of the state appellate bench complained that her nomination was a “slap in the face” because she had “never been a judge at any level.” Willie Brown, a former mayor of San Francisco, asked in The San Francisco Chronicle “why the governor had to go all the way to the East Coast” for a new justice.

“Were there no qualified African Americans in California?” wrote the mayor, who is African American.

Within weeks, however, Justice Kruger was unanimously confirmed; the hearing was so deferential and swift that the court’s chief justice was still asking who was in favor when the confirmation panel — which included the state’s then-attorney general, Kamala Harris — interrupted with “aye” votes. Eight years later, she has forged a reputation as one of the most influential voices on the highest court in the nation’s most populous state.

It is an achievement that now could prove as consequential as any Beltway credential. If selected from President Biden’s short list of candidates to succeed Justice Stephen G. Breyer on the U.S. Supreme Court, she could become not only the first Black female justice, but also a mediating force on an institution notable for its polarization.

Senate Republican leaders have warned that they will oppose “radical left” nominees. But jurists across the political spectrum say that, like the president, Justice Kruger’s hallmark is moderation.

“She’s a consensus builder,” said Tani Cantil-Sakauye, the chief justice of the California Supreme Court, who was appointed in 2011 by a Republican governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger. “Beyond her obviously glittering Ivy League education and her brilliant mind is this incredibly humble, self-effacing personality who is very persuasive in bringing groups together on different legal arcs.”

That instinct for reasoned persuasion has made Justice Kruger, 45, a powerful backstage force on a split court whose majority has shifted from right to left during her tenure. Since her arrival, California’s high court — notorious as recently as a decade ago for its partisanship and division — has voted unanimously in nearly nine out of 10 decisions, a rate that far outstrips the U.S. Supreme Court’s unanimity.

David A. Carrillo, executive director of the California Constitution Center at the University of California, Berkeley, said Justice Kruger has been “a key factor” in that shift, working behind the scenes to craft decisions that keep to the letter of the law and transcend ideological viewpoints. In a recently published analysis, Mr. Carrillo found that she rarely dissents, “and when she does it’s usually to argue that the court has gone too far.”

Her opinions on occasion have evoked sharp dissents from liberal colleagues. In 2018, for instance, she authored a 4-3 ruling upholding a state requirement that felony arrestees — even before they are convicted — surrender DNA samples, a law that dissenting liberal justices decried as an unconstitutional “biological dragnet.”

Joined by the court’s Republican appointees, she relied on U.S. Supreme Court precedent to determine that a DNA swab was legitimately taken from an accused arsonist, but deliberately left open the larger constitutional question. The dissenting justices argued the court should have been bolder in protecting privacy rights given California’s own laws, with one deriding the majority opinion as “in tension even with its own logic.”

Another dissent warned that the ruling meant “it is not that far a step for the state to collect and retain DNA from law-abiding people in general.”

But Justice Kruger’s defenders note that, by drawing the decision narrowly, she arguably prevented the U.S. Supreme Court from subsequently overturning the ruling.

Many liberal jurists in the state are still smarting.

“Some may see what she did as a cop-out, but others might see it as a pragmatic way to view the issue,” said the California Court of Appeal Justice J. Anthony Kline, adding that he still disagrees.

In a profession that is noisy with self promotion, Justice Kruger declined President Biden’s offer last year to make her solicitor general, a prestigious appointment, preferring to remain on the bench. Friends and colleagues describe her as “chill” and “measured,” a homebody whose leisure pastime in law school was reality TV.

The daughter of pediatricians — her father white and Jewish, her mother Black and Jamaican-born — she maintains ties with a sprawling extended family that includes half-siblings who grew up while her father was running clinics in the late 1960s for underserved Black communities in Florida and Mississippi.

Her husband, Brian Hauck, a partner at Jenner & Block who works in the firm’s San Francisco office, is a regulatory lawyer from Wisconsin; they met as summer associates in Washington, D.C., were married in Jamaica and host an annual Jamaican feast to celebrate their anniversary. Justice Kruger’s son was a toddler when she joined the California Supreme Court, and her daughter’s arrival made her the first member to give birth while on the court.

“We had our first ever baby shower at the court,” Chief Justice Cantil-Sakauye said. “With a diaper cake.”

A month later, Justice Kruger flew with the nursing infant to Los Angeles to preside over hearings, pulling on her black robe and leaving the baby in chambers with her mother-in-law during courtroom arguments. The two children now attend public school in Oakland, near her home.

The justice and her husband, colleagues say, pack their lunches for work. They drive an electric car, not for the political statement, but because, she advises friends, EVs can use car pool lanes on California freeways, cutting commute times. Co-workers talk about her rowdy laugh and her modesty.

“She’s not a fancy person,” said Kathleen Hartnett, a lawyer and decades-long friend who lives nearby, and with whom the justice periodically shares hand-me-downs for Ms. Hartnett’s children. “People here will socialize with her or talk to her at birthday parties and be surprised to later realize they were talking to a California Supreme Court justice.”

Recordings of cases she has argued and heard reveal an easy, conversational style — less like a debate than an invitation to solve a problem together.

“If you test her in an argument, she doesn’t take you on in a confrontational way. Rather, she questions your premises, very kindly,” Justice Kline said. “She’s remarkably effective. And her relationships are good. She’s careful with people.”

Recently, one of her former law clerks, now an associate at a Washington, D.C., law firm, wrote an open letter on Twitter to the White House, detailing “Justice Kruger’s exceptional kindness and decency” — taking meetings in the offices of clerks, rather than summoning them to chambers, and insisting that family come first when his wife developed a pregnancy complication.

“With Justice Kruger,” the clerk wrote, “the United States Supreme Court will be more wise and more just.”

At her court confirmation, Justice Kruger credited her approach to her mother, Dr. Audrey Reid, who is 80 and still practicing part time in Southern California.

“I learned through her example of reaching out to people from all walks of life that what unites us is far more important than anything that might divide us,” she said, adding her mother also prized being “of service.”

Service was a priority as well for her father, who died in 2005. In 1967, long before she was born, Dr. Leon Kruger, a Boston physician, joined the Civil Rights movement and moved his then-wife and three of their four children to an impoverished, all-Black town in the Mississippi Delta, where he and Tufts University physicians established a clinic.

The episode shaped and traumatized the family, according to memoirs and blog posts by the justice’s half-siblings, Jo Ivester and Charles Kruger. The experience led their parents to similar activism in Florida and California but also eventually ended their marriage. They said they are intensely proud of Justice Kruger but otherwise declined to comment. Their parents divorced in 1974, records show, and a year later, Dr. Kruger married Dr. Reid, who had an adolescent child.

Leondra, their only offspring, grew up in South Pasadena, a leafy Los Angeles suburb so old-fashioned that the movie “Back to the Future” was filmed there. A National Merit Scholar, she attended the elite Polytechnic School nearby, working on the school newspaper and doing homework at her mother’s office after class.

She attended Harvard University, where she covered local news for The Harvard Crimson, and, in a rare dip into opinion, once tweaked East Coast biases against California. (“Earthquakes! Fires! Mudslides! Riots! You’re going to fall into the ocean and die!”)

Adriane Lentz-Smith, a history professor at Duke University who was a college roommate, said that even then, “she was a different creature from the rest of us,” volunteering on the night shift at a homeless shelter and at Boston public schools, teaching civics.

She became the first Black woman to serve as editor in chief of the Yale Law Journal, and in 2002, clerked for Judge David S. Tatel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, who then recommended her as a clerk for then-Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens.

There, in 2003, a fellow clerk recalled, her instant mastery of the behemoth McCain-Feingold campaign finance law, which was before the court that session, established her as a star.

She spent two years with Wilmer, Cutler, Pickering, Hale & Dorr, a Washington law firm, and a year teaching at the University of Chicago law school before joining the solicitor general’s office in 2007, eventually becoming the first Black woman to serve as the acting deputy solicitor general. She has argued more cases before the U.S. Supreme Court than any Black woman in history, winning the majority.

But even in defeat, colleagues recalled, she displayed remarkable composure.

Called upon to argue a high-profile 2012 case that opened the Obama administration up to accusations that it was antagonistic toward religious freedom, for example, she faced down nearly 30 blistering minutes of rapid-fire questioning from the full court.

The case, involving a Lutheran church, Hosanna-Tabor, that fired one of its teachers after she violated church prohibitions against suing over workplace matters, tested a federal rule that allows churches to make personnel decisions without government interference.

Ms. Kruger, then a 35-year-old career civil servant, was still completing her opening remarks, arguing that the teacher should not have been fired, when Justice John Roberts pressed her on the government’s position, triggering the onslaught.

“Leondra took some of the heat for that, but it was my decision,” said Donald B. Verrilli, who was then the solicitor general. He said he now regrets the government’s position in the case, which he called tone deaf on issues of religious liberty.

When a cluster of vacancies on the California Supreme Court gave then-Governor Brown an opportunity to remake it, her reviews were glowing, from Mr. Brown’s fellow Yale Law School alumni to the U.S. Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan, he said.

“We started to talk, and within 10 or 15 minutes I was fairly sure I was going to appoint her,” Mr. Brown recalled in an interview from his home in rural California, citing her “elegant” thinking. “I wanted people who could not just make a decision but fit it into the longer intellectual tradition in the law — the wider sweep, the larger view.”

Her youth did not concern him, he said: “Superior people are noticeable and unusual if you have the eyes to see it.” How the narrowly divided Senate might see Justice Kruger, however, is another question, the governor noted.

“I don’t know if all this stuff matters,” Mr. Brown said. “Isn’t it going to just be politics?”