Laura McCreery is a writer and oral history researcher specializing in California politics, government, and public policy. She came to ISSI as Oral History Project Director (2014-2021) after conducting oral history research at the Institute of Governmental Studies (2006-2014) and The Bancroft Library (2001-2006). Now an affiliated researcher, she serves also as oral history adviser on the steering committee for “BLAC,” Black Lives at Cal.
In consultation with Berkeley Law, McCreery led the California Supreme Court Oral History Project until 2021, completing archival oral histories of nine justices for the collection of The Bancroft Library. Her oral history of Chief Justice Ronald M. George, published as Chief: the Quest for Justice in California, recounts his extraordinary career—from deputy attorney general through fifteen years as chief justice—and his authorship of In re Marriage Cases (2008), which established the fundamental right to marry for same-sex couples in California and paved the way for such rights nationwide. The oral history was named a California Book Award winner by the Commonwealth Club for 2013.
While at The Bancroft Library’s Regional Oral History Office [now Oral History Center], she directed the program in politics and government, conducting video interviews with forty-nine attorneys who had served as law clerks to U.S. Chief Justice Earl Warren during the momentous period when the U.S. Supreme Court decided civil rights and due process cases such as Brown v. Board of Education (1954); Gideon v. Wainwright (1963), and Miranda v. Arizona (1966), as well as reapportionment cases that advanced voting rights.
Although specializing in oral history of the judiciary, she also has interviewed widely on California’s legislative and executive branches. In 2012 and 2013, she recorded a fifty-hour oral history of Governor Gray Davis (under seal at Bancroft), whose time as governor capped decades of service to California in four elected offices.
Her projects explored statewide issues but also local and regional transportation, water, and land use. She interviewed elected board members and administrators of the East Bay Regional Park District and wrote a history of that agency, Living Landscape (Wilderness Press, 2010, with a foreword by Congressman George Miller). While at ISSI, she also established oral history projects on California land trusts and on Bay Area civil engineering and public works.
McCreery’s articles have appeared in such journals as California Legal History, Oregon Historical Quarterly, and California Historian as well as in the San Francisco Chronicle, Bay Nature, and the East Bay Monthly. A former president of the Northwest Oral History Association (2003-2005), she has consulted for such clients as the Environmental Defense Fund, Reed College, the Society of California Archivists, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, the Novato History Museum, and the Contra Costa County Historical Society.
