Gordon B. Burns

Justice Burns was appointed as Associate Justice to the First District Court of Appeal, Division Five, by Governor Edmund G. Brown Jr. in December 2018.

Prior to his appointment, Justice Burns spent most of his career as an attorney in the California Department of Justice, where he worked on a wide variety of matters. He served as Deputy Attorney General with the Tort and Condemnation Section from 1997 to 1999, followed by the Land Law Section from 1999 to 2006. In 2004, Justice Burns was granted a fellowship to study Supreme Court practice with the National Association of Attorneys General in Washington D.C. Beginning in 2006, he served as the state’s first Deputy Solicitor General for Civil Law, supervising the state’s civil cases in the California Supreme Court and the United States Supreme Court. In December 2011, Governor Brown appointed him Undersecretary of the California Environmental Protection Agency, an agency that employed 6,000 people and had a budget of $4.7 billion.

Justice Burns holds a degree in history from the University of California Los Angeles and a law degree from the University of California Hastings College of the Law. He and his wife Julie live in San Francisco and have four adult children.