L.A. justice on Supreme Court short list

Carlos Moreno, a justice of the California Supreme Court, is reportedly on President Obama's short list for the U.S. Supreme Court.

Moreno is an L.A. native, and started his law career in the L.A. City Attorney's office. He was appointed to the California Supreme Court by Gov. Gray Davis in 2001, after serving three years as a federal judge. According to reports, he was recommended to Obama by Sen. Dianne Feinstein.

Obama has said he wants an empathetic judge, and Moreno seems to meet that qualification. He and his wife, Christine, have cared for their autistic niece for the past eight years. Here is Moreno, who chairs a Blue Ribbon Commission on Children in Foster Care, discussing that experience in 2006:

My own commitment to the issue of foster care is both professional and personal... For close to the past six years, my wife and I have been relative caregivers for our special needs 10-year-old niece. She was removed from her mother's home in New Jersey by the state children's services department.

Weighing just 33 pounds, she was suffering from neglect, dehydration, and malnutrition. When she was placed in a local hospital, she was belatedly diagnosed as autistic and developmentally delayed, completely lacking in life skills such as language, potty training and even something so basic as chewing food (at 5 years old she was still taking food from a baby bottle). Her mother had not sought services; in fact, owing to her own schizophrenia, she had diligently avoided any contact with social and medical services and relatives who could assist her. We took custody of our niece, because the only other option was... to institutionalize her for perhaps the rest of her life.

My wife and I have struggled over the past five years, dealing with children's services in New Jersey for assistance, but also relying upon local, L.A. County children's service providers -- medical, educational, occupational, behavioral -- to address the overwhelming problem of caring for an autistic child. Neither my wife nor I had any prior experience, of any significant note, with the healthcare system, much less any experience in dealing with autistic children. And I tell you, this has been perhaps the most difficult experience I've ever had in my entire life.

The couple had to hire a lawyer to fight the L.A. Unified School District over their daughter's educational program. Here's Moreno's wife, who is an artist and a college professor, speaking to the L.A. Daily Journal about that last year:

"We had to hire a lawyer to defend her educational rights," Chris Moreno said. "Los Angeles Unified held a secret Individualized Education Assessment meeting and changed her school and canceled all her services... They took care of it as a budget item. They never met her. They didn't know what her needs are.... She has myself and my husband as her advocates, and it's still so grueling a process."

Also under consideration, according to the AP, are Solicitor General Elena Kagan, Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and U.S. Appeals Court judges Sonia Sotomayor and Diane Pamela Wood.