SACRAMENTO – Governor Edmund G. Brown Jr. on Thursday released annual applicant and appointee data for his administration’s first year of judicial appointments.

Under SB 56, signed in 2006, the governor is required to disclose aggregate statewide demographic data provided by all judicial applicants relative to ethnicity and gender each year by March 1.

In 2011, there were a total of 768 judicial appointment applicants, the Governor's Office reported.

Women accounted for 32 percent of the applicant pool and 33 percent of Governor Brown’s judicial appointments, according to the report.

Nearly one-third of the applicant pool identified themselves as American Indian or Alaska Native, Asian, Black or African-American, Hispanic, Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander, or other/unknown, and more than half (53 percent) of Gov. Brown’s appointees were from these groups.

Governor Brown’s judicial appointees included a number of notable minority judges, including Goodwin Liu, appointed to the California Supreme Court; Kathleen O’Leary, the first female presiding justice in the history of the Fourth District Court of Appeal, Division Three; and Raquel Marquez, the first Latina judge in the history of the Riverside County Superior Court.

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