Sheila Kuehl ’62

Sheila James Kuehl ’62 has enjoyed a long and varied career in the public eye, going from successful child actress to dedicated elected official.

As a child, Kuehl appeared in hit television shows, including Trouble With Father, The Stu Erwin Show and in The Many Lives of Dobie Gillis in the 1960s. After her show Broadside was cancelled, Kuehl returned to UCLA as associate dean of students, then earned her law degree from Harvard. She cofounded the California Women’s Law Center and was a professor at the UCLA, USC and Loyola law schools.

Elected to the California State Assembly in 1994, representing the 41st District, Kuehl was a founding member of the California Legislative LGBT Caucus. She was also the first woman in California to serve as speaker pro tempore, during the 1997-98 legislative session. She served as chair of the Assembly Select Committee on California’s Women.

In 2000, after three terms in the Assembly, Kuehl was elected to the California State Senate to represent the 23rd Congressional District. She served as chair of the Senate Select Committee on School Safety. She was re-elected in 2004 with 65.7% of the vote.

Throughout her legislative career, Kuehl championed the safety and well-being of children. Her most notable school safety legislation was the California Student Safety and Violence Prevention Act of 2000, which added sexual orientation and gender identity to the list of prohibited bases for discrimination in publicly funded schools

Kuehl took a leadership role on health care policy as well. Her primary objective was to secure legislation to establish a single-payer health care in California. In both 2006 and 2007, she sponsored SB840, which was passed both times by both houses of the legislature only to be vetoed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

During her legislative career, she authored laws to strengthen civil rights protections for students; fund after-school programs for at-risk children and young adults; enhance services for pregnant and parenting teens in the foster care system; require training to enable Child Protective Service workers to recognize the indicators and effects of teen dating violence; enable parents to insure that childcare providers have no criminal records or history of child abuse; and make it more difficult for batterers to be awarded custody of minor children.

Kuehl was repeatedly voted the “smartest” member of the California Legislature.

Kuehl earned her bachelor’s degree in English from UCLA in 1962. In 1975, she was admitted to Harvard Law School, where she was elected class marshal and class president of the law school student council. In 1978, she became the first woman to win “Best Oralist” in the law school’s prestigious Ames Moot Court Competition, judged by a panel that included then-Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall.

Kuehl received the 1993 UCLA Award for Community Service and the 2000 UCLA Award for Public Service.