How do judges of the Supreme Court of California reach the bench?

The court's current selection method is merit selection with retention.

Supreme Court of California / Joined 2015 / Active

Leondra Reid Kruger

Associate Justice, Supreme Court of California

Leondra Reid Kruger is an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of California, serving since 2015. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: Since 2015 · 11 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
2015	Supreme Court of California	–	–

Education

Harvard University	with high honors	1997
Yale University		2001

Judicial Record

In our data, Kruger authored 47 published opinions for the court (2015–2019), plus 3 dissents and 1 concurrence. Most cited: People v. Rangel (533 citations).

Published, precedential opinions from the CourtListener corpus. Counts and rankings are objective and recomputable: how we count. We describe the record, not the judge. 51 of these were attributed to Kruger by a unique court-, date-, and surname-match against our roster (marked ), because CourtListener recorded no author for them. Each links to the official text to verify. How we match.

Selected opinions

Year	Case	Citation	Cited
2016	People v. Rangel†	62 Cal. 4th 1192	533
2019	Wilson v. Cable News Network, Inc.†	249 Cal. Rptr. 3d 569	356
2018	People v. Daveggio & Michaud†	231 Cal. Rptr. 3d 646	255
2016	People v. Conley†	63 Cal. 4th 646	255
2016	Baltazar v. Forever 21, Inc.†	62 Cal. 4th 1237	223
2017	Mountain Air Enters., LLC v. Sundowner Towers, LLC†	220 Cal. Rptr. 3d 650	207
2017	People v. Gallardo†	226 Cal. Rptr. 3d 379	200
2016	People v. Grimes†	1 Cal. 5th 698	196
2018	People v. Ghobrial†	234 Cal. Rptr. 3d 669	151
2017	People v. Page†	225 Cal. Rptr. 3d 786	142
2016	People v. O'Malley†	62 Cal. 4th 944	137
2018	People v. Buenrostro†	240 Cal. Rptr. 3d 704	133
2017	People v. Patterson†	216 Cal. Rptr. 3d 95	126
2016	Sandquist v. Lebo Automotive, Inc.· Dissent†	1 Cal. 5th 233	119
2017	People v. Jones†	220 Cal. Rptr. 3d 618	117

Showing the 15 most-cited of 51 authored opinions in our data. “Cited” is inbound citations across the CourtListener corpus. Case links open the ruling’s full text (CourtListener) or its page here; read the methodology and verify against the primary source.

Questions & answers

How do judges of the Supreme Court of California reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is merit selection with retention.
Which court is Leondra Reid Kruger on?: Leondra Reid Kruger is an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of California.

Sources

Each fact on this page traces to a primary public record.

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11 years on the Supreme Court of California. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).