Associate Justice Miguel Márquez was appointed to the California Court of Appeal by Governor Edmund G. Brown on May 18, 2012, and was confirmed by the Commission on Judicial Appointments on June 28, 2012.
Before assuming judicial office, Justice Márquez served as the County Counsel for the County of Santa Clara. As County Counsel, he was the chief legal advisor to the Board of Supervisors, the County Executive, all elected officials and department heads of the County, as well as several school districts and other special districts.
Immediately before joining the County Counsel’s Office, Justice Márquez served as General Counsel for the San Francisco Unified School District. He had previously served as a Deputy City Attorney in the San Francisco City Attorney’s Office and as a Deputy County Counsel in San Mateo County. And he had previously worked in two private law firms: Cooley LLP and Remcho, Johansen & Purcell. Prior to law school, Justice Márquez was a Management Consultant at KPMG Peat Marwick, where he was part of a national financial and organizational consulting practice.
Born in California, Justice Márquez’s commitment to public service in part grows out of his early public school experiences. His parents immigrated to the United States from México with only a limited amount of formal education. Spanish was his first language, so Head Start programs were critical to his early education. These formative experiences gave impetus to his early career as a school lawyer and more generally inspired his commitment to public service.
Justice Márquez received his law degree from the Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California at Berkeley, his Masters in Public Policy from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, and his bachelor's degree in Public Policy from Stanford University.