Amazing Cool: Keeping Up With Goodwin Liu

• Publication year: 2016
• Author: By Benjamin G. Shatz

Amazing Cool: Keeping Up With Goodwin Liu

By Benjamin G. Shatz

According to Senator Dianne Feinstein, California Supreme Court Justice Goodwin Liu has "amazing cool." California Litigation Review couldn't agree more! Justice Liu granted us an hour of his time on November 15, 2016, in his chambers—a spacious corner office formerly occupied by judicial luminaries including Justices Carlos Moreno, Stanley Mosk, and Roger Traynor. Below are edited excerpts from the interview.

CLR: Much of your personal background is already public record. You were born in Augusta, Georgia, in 1970, to Taiwanese immigrant parents, who were both medical doctors. You moved to Sacramento in 1977 and attended public schools, earning straight A's since the fifth grade. Why were you such a slacker in the fourth grade? What else can you share about your childhood?

GL: Fourth grade was challenging! I tried to do all kinds of things to fit into the mainstream. I often give a talk about what it was like to be a little Asian-American kid growing up in the predominantly white suburbs of Sacramento. I tried to do very American things, like join the Cub Scouts. There's a great photo of me in the regulation shirt, scarf, and hat, accompanied by horrible plaid pants with knee patches. The pants were not regulation.

CLR: You were not one of those kids who grew up wanting to be a lawyer.

GL: No, not at all. My parents had good education and came here to complete their professional training. So they were reasonably secure in terms of having employment and making ends meet. But they didn't come here with much money or familiarity with America. They were focused on trying to raise a family and becoming settled in a new and different place. I certainly had many advantages growing up; my parents strongly supported my education and we were not poor. But the thought that I would someday be a lawyer was entirely unanticipated. Law is a field that's set in a particular cultural, governmental, and societal context—and during my childhood, the American context was not the context my parents were most familiar with.

CLR: No one in your family had been a lawyer. Who was the first lawyer you ever knew?

GL: Probably the first lawyer I met was my congressman in Sacramento, Bob Matsui, who turned out to be a very important mentor in my life. When I was a junior in high school, Bob sponsored me to be a page in the House of Representatives. Back then, pages were the equivalent to what e-mail is today: We were the gofers who delivered messages from office to office. I worked as a page for a semester, and it was a tremendous experience—having access wherever I wanted to go on Capitol Hill, including the House and Senate floors, was just amazing. At the time, Bob was one of three Asian-Americans in the entire Congress, and he was incredibly well respected, very articulate, and very prepared. He was on the Ways and Means Committee. Had he not died so young, he would have eventually become the chair or ranking member of that committee. That was an inspiration for me.

CLR: You went on to be co-valedictorian of your high school class and tennis team captain. So, unlike many straight-A students, you probably had a date to the prom. And music is important to many high school students...

GL: Yes, I did have a date—but it was at the last minute. And as for music, I developed two speeds for music: bad '80s music, which is still my baseline, and classical music. I took piano lessons for more than 10 years, and I complained as much as any kid would about that. But I do enjoy playing piano today and feel all those lessons were a real gift. Between those two extremes—classical music and '80s pop—I don't listen to much else.

CLR: Then you went to Stanford as a pre-med biology major, graduated Phi Beta Kappa, and earned admission to medical school at Harvard and UCSF.

GL: Yes, I went to college as a pre-med. Luckily I have an older brother who became a surgeon. That checked a box for my parents, which kind of took the pressure off me. In college, there were other things I found interesting, like K-12 education. I helped put together a big campus-wide conference on education, working with two graduate students. In preparing the topics and speakers for that, I learned about the major debates in public education. It was a tremendous exposure to many fascinating issues.

CLR: How did you get involved in that education conference? Weren't you supposed to be studying organic chemistry?

GL: I did that too, of course. But I also found public service very motivating. I had an important mentor at Stanford named Catherine Milton, who was the director of what is now the Haas Center for Public Service, the campus...