Frank J. Menetrez

Justice Frank J. Menetrez was appointed to the Court of Appeal, Fourth District, Division Two, by Governor Jerry Brown in October 2018. He was confirmed by unanimous vote of the Commission on Judicial Appointments on November 26, 2018, having been rated “exceptionally well qualified” by the state bar’s Commission on Judicial Nominees Evaluation. Before his appointment to the Court of Appeal, Justice Menetrez served as a judge of the Superior Court of Los Angeles County, where he was assigned to the juvenile dependency court and managed a docket of over 500 pending cases with over 1,000 children under his supervision.

Before his appointment to the bench, Justice Menetrez served for 10 years as an appellate judicial attorney for the Hon. Frances Rothschild, Presiding Justice of Division One of the Second District. Justice Menetrez previously worked as an associate at Horvitz & Levy and at Sidley Austin.

Justice Menetrez grew up in Maryland. He graduated from Johns Hopkins University in three years with a double major in mathematics and philosophy. In 1987, he relocated to southern California to enter the doctoral program in philosophy at UCLA. He earned his Ph.D. in philosophy in 1996 upon the completion of his dissertation, Action, Intention, and Reference: An Argument Against Naturalistic Reduction in Semantics.

Justice Menetrez next attended law school at UCLA, where he served as editor-in-chief of the UCLA Law Review, graduated as a member of the Order of the Coif, and received UCLA’s Outstanding Graduate Student Award. He then clerked for the Hon. A. Wallace Tashima of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

Justice Menetrez has taught courses on appellate practice and procedure, juvenile dependency law, and criminal law. He has authored articles on various legal topics for the Daily Journal and has published two works of legal scholarship, Employee Status and the Concept of Control in Federal Employment Discrimination Law (2010) 63 SMU L. Rev. 137 and Lawless Law Enforcement: The Judicial Invention of Absolute Immunity for Police and Prosecutors in California (2009) 49 Santa Clara L. Rev. 393, in addition to the law review comment that he published as a student, Consequentialism, Promissory Obligation, and the Theory of Efficient Breach (2000) 47 UCLA L. Rev. 859.