A Conversation With California Supreme Court Justice Joshua P. Groban

• Jurisdiction: California,United States
• Citation: Vol. 31 No. 1
• Publication year: 2021
• Author: By Cheryl Lee Johnson and Courtney A. Palko
• topic: Business of Law,Civil Procedure

A CONVERSATION WITH CALIFORNIA SUPREME COURT JUSTICE JOSHUA P. GROBAN

By Cheryl Lee Johnson and Courtney A. Palko¹

For the seventh consecutive year, we have been privileged to have a Justice of the California Supreme Court address our members. We welcomed Joshua P. Groban at the 2020 Golden State Institute. He shared with us his major life influences, his path to the California Supreme Court, his judicial philosophy, and his sports allegiances. The panel was presented in a question-and-answer format. What follows is an edited transcript of the conversation.

MS. COURTNEY PALKO:

It is our great honor to have with us today California Supreme Court Justice Joshua Groban, the most recent appointee to the Court. Justice Groban has had a remarkable career dedicated to legal excellence and public service. A southern California native, he was raised in Del Mar, California, where he attended public schools. His parents both led lives in public service; his father is a physician and professor at UC San Diego and VA hospitals and his mother is a retired social worker and former member of the Del Mar City Council.

Justice Groban received a BA with honors and distinction from Stanford in modern thought and literature, and then received his JD cum laude from Harvard Law School. Following law school, Justice Groban clerked for the Honorable William C. Conner of the Southern District of New York. He then spent six years in private practice in New York at Paul Weiss, where he was lead counsel on the firm's largest pro bono case at the time.

MS. CHERYL JOHNSON:

Justice Groban then moved to Los Angeles where he practiced at Munger, Tolles & Olson for five years. There he specialized in complex litigation with a focus on antitrust, intellectual property, and internal investigations. His career took a turn, some would say a semi-seismic turn, when he took a leave of absence from Munger Tolles to serve as legal counsel to Jerry Brown's campaign for California governor in 2010. After Brown's election, Justice Groban served as a senior advisor in his administration, overseeing state judicial appointments and advising the governor on litigation and policy. In this role, he screened and interviewed more than a thousand candidates for judicial office. He oversaw the appointment of over 600 state judges, or approximately one out of every three judges in the state.

In 2018, Governor Brown appointed Justice Groban to the California Supreme Court to fill the seat vacated by retiring Justice Werdegar. He was sworn into office in January 2019. Justice Groban and his wife, Deborah, have two young children and he claims the Southland as his home.

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So, with that briefest of background, we're going to turn to our questions for Justice Groban. Courtney, can you start?

MS. COURTNEY PALKO:

Thank you for joining us today, Justice Groban. Let's jump right in and talk about your early career. What influenced you to decide to pursue a career in law, and was this a career path that your parents approved or encouraged?

JUSTICE JOSHUA GROBAN:

Thank you, Courtney, and first, let me say thanks so much for having me; I'm delighted to be with you all. I wish we could be in person but maybe next year. And as somebody who practiced in this field in a prior life, I'm particularly delighted to be here.

I think I knew I wanted to be a lawyer from a pretty early age. I'm not quite sure how I got that in my head other than the robust discussions that would break out at the dinner table. We were a family that ate dinner together every night and for a good chunk of my childhood, the three homes of my grandparents, my own family and my aunt and uncle and cousins were all in walking distance of one another. So at the dinner table, there was a lot of discussion amongst physician, social worker, lawyer, and political science professor, and the discussions were robust and I think that put me on my way, so to speak.

MS. COURTNEY PALKO:

That's interesting. You practiced in private law for over a decade. Why did you choose private practice and what part of it did you enjoy the most?

JUSTICE JOSHUA GROBAN:

I wish I could say it was part of some grand strategy about the trajectory of my career but in retrospect, I was 25, 26 years old and most of my colleagues were going off to private practice and I thought I would do the same. Part of what motivated me was I had taken a one-year clerkship in New York, and the year whizzed by and I wanted to stay. And several of my friends from law school were thriving at Paul Weiss and I joined them, much to my delight. But I confess, it was not part of any grand scheme.

MS. COURTNEY PALKO:

Given that you enjoyed some aspects of private practice and had some friends there with you, what prompted you to leave to join Jerry Brown's campaign? And Governor Brown is generally known for running a lean team; what was life like for you on the campaign trail?

JUSTICE JOSHUA GROBAN:

Yes, lean is right. Once again, it would probably be more correct and proper of me to describe my career as some great, grand plan but, again, a good deal of serendipity is involved. I was happily litigating at Munger Tolles and knew that one of my colleagues was friendly with the Browns; I popped in his office one day and said I'd be delighted to have an introduction and give them a little bit of pro bono assistance on what was then a very early 2010 gubernatorial campaign. What I did not appreciate, and as your question suggests, is I thought I would be joining a massive campaign team and just working on the outskirts. What I didn't appreciate is that when I joined the "team", the team was Anne Brown [Jerry Brown's] wife, two interns, and a dog. As a consequence, the number of things I was being asked to do increased, increased, increased and increased, and ultimately, the firm allowed me to take a leave of absence to serve as general counsel to the campaign. And as they say, one thing led to another and here I am many years later.

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MS. CHERYL JOHNSON:

So, you were nominated by Governor Brown to replace Justice Werdegar. Did you ever aspire to be a judge before your work with Governor Brown?

JUSTICE JOSHUA GROBAN:

You keep giving me opportunities to say that my career has been carefully plotted out and, in candor, I keep having to say otherwise. I suppose on some level, for every lawyer, the thought crosses his or her mind. But it was not something that was at the forefront of my mind by any stretch of the imagination. And indeed, as I was conducting, as you said, over 1,000 interviews for judicial appointments for Governor Brown, I was always surprised there was an occasional candidate who would say to me, "I knew since law school that my goal was to be a judge." That always surprised me, in part because the thought really was never forefront in my own mind. But I was interested in the law, I had appeared plenty in court, and I had a sense of what a good judge looked like and what a not-so-good judge looked like. And so, when there was an opportunity to help with judicial appointments, I jumped at that. And then over the course of eight years of thinking every day about what it is like to be a judge, and what it is like to be a good judge, then of course, the thought percolated in my mind, but again, it was a process, not a grand strategy.

MS. CHERYL JOHNSON:

Since you've had such a large imprint on our state judiciary, we would like to discuss your approach to judicial appointments. The California judiciary is twice the size of the federal judiciary. I think that is a statistic that many of us don't really appreciate; no nation has as many judges as California has and you were responsible for the appointment of almost one-third of the judges during your service with Brown. I know you said you identified what you thought were good and bad judges; can you tell us what traits you thought made for a good and bad judge, and how you sought to change the ways that judges were identified, approved, and assigned from what previous governors had done?

JUSTICE JOSHUA GROBAN:

Yes, a couple of things. I think Governor Brown's vision was really to find excellent lawyers who would make excellent judges but to do that wherever he might find them. And by that, I mean I think there was a notion in prior administrations of a certain [ judicial] prototype of a trial lawyer, often a prosecutor, or if they were in civil practice, a particular kind of commercial litigator, and not so much of those who were public defenders or family law lawyers or people doing arbitration or academics. I think the approach that Governor Brown took was that we want really accomplished lawyers at the top of their field wherever we might find them. He was less concerned, for example, about whether they had primarily a family law practice. If you call the presiding judge of a superior court, particularly a larger one like Los Angeles and San Francisco, and said, "How would you like a new judge who is a certified family law specialist, who is beloved in the field, who...