Gordon B. Burns

Justice Burns was appointed 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. He was a Deputy Attorney General with the Tort and Condemnation Section from 1997 to 1999. He then joined the Land Law Section, where he worked on natural resources litigation, including disputes over the San Francisco Bay/Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.

In 2006, Justice Burns was appointed to serve as the state’s first Deputy Solicitor General for Civil Law. In this capacity, he supervised 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. His areas of responsibility included water rights, water quality, drinking water infrastructure, drought management, cannabis regulation, and agriculture.

Justice Burns holds a degree in history from the University of California Los Angeles and a law degree from the University of California College of the Law, San Francisco (formerly Hastings). He and his wife live in San Francisco.