Tuesday, August 27, 2013
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California Supreme Court Appoints Miriam Krinsky, Hernán Vera to State Bar Board of Trustees
By a MetNews Staff Writer
The California Supreme Court yesterday named former County Bar President Miriam Krinsky and Public Counsel President Hernán D. Vera to the State Bar Board of Trustees.
Their terms will commence Oct. 12 and last for three years. They are the Supreme Court’s second and third appointees to the board under SB163.
That legislation renamed the former Board of Governors and provided for a transition from a 23-member body primarily elected by lawyers to a smaller board with a primarily unelected membership.
When the transition period ends in October of next year, the board will consist of 19 members, five of whom will be attorneys appointed by the Supreme Court.
The board will also include six elected lawyers, one from each of the state’s six appellate court districts; six public members, same as at present; and two attorneys appointed by the legislative leadership.
All three of the Supreme Court’s appointees have come from Los Angeles County, as Krinsky and Vera will be joining David Pasternak, like Krinsky a former County Bar president.
A committee appointed by the Supreme Court recommended candidates for appointment.
Krinsky is an educator, and a former federal prosecutor. She teaches child welfare policy and juvenile law to graduate students at UCLA and at Loyola Law School. She is a member of the Judicial Council’s Blue Ribbon Commission on Children in Foster Care and a policy consultant to The California Endowment.
She recently served as executive director of the Los Angeles County Citizens’ Jail Commission and was executive Director of the Children’s Law Center of Los Angeles. Before that, she worked in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles, heading the appellate division for a time. She received the Department of Justice John Marshall Award for her appellate work.
She was the first County Bar president to come from the public sector and also served as chair of the California Bench-Bar Coalition. She was appointed as a voting member to the Judicial Council in 2009 and served on a number of the council’s internal committees. She recently worked with the Administrative Office of the Courts’ Center for Families, Children and the Courts as a special consultant on the creation of the statewide Child Welfare Council.
A graduate of UCLA and its law school, she has also been active in Los Angeles city affairs, serving as president of the city’s Ethics Commission and more recently as a member of City Attorney Mike Feuer’s transition team.
Vera serves as president and chief executive officer of Public Counsel—which bills itself as the nation’s largest pro bono public interest law firm—where he has worked since 2002. Before that, he was a commercial litigator with O’Melveny & Myers.
He has also worked as an education staff attorney for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund and clerked for U.S. District Court Judge Consuelo B. Marshall of the Central District of California.
Vera joined the State Bar in 1994 after graduating from Stanford University and the UCLA School of Law.
He was appointed to the board of the State Justice Institute by President Obama in 2010. He has been a lawyer representative to the Ninth Circuit Judicial Conference, a member of the Steering Committee of the Open Courts Coalition, and a member of the boards of the California Reinvestment Coalition and the Los Angeles Center for Law and Justice.
Copyright 2013, Metropolitan News Company