Josephine "Joyce" Luther Kennard (born May 6, 1941) is a Dutch-American judge and former Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of California.

[1] The rigidity of the Dutch educational system meant that Kennard's hopes of attending university were derailed when she contracted a tumor on her right leg, which resulted in the amputation of part of that limb at age 16.

[3] In 1961, she was able to immigrate to the United States as a result of a special law that authorized 15,000 additional visas for Dutch Indonesian refugees.

In 1971, she graduated with a Bachelor of Arts with Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude honors in German from the University of Southern California.

She then became a Senior Attorney for Associate Justice Edwin F. Beach of the California Court of Appeal, Second District, in Los Angeles.

During her time on the bench, Kennard has authored numerous high-profile opinions, the best-known of which is Kasky v. Nike (2002)[8] In that case, the California Supreme Court held that Nike could not claim a First Amendment "commercial free speech" defense when charged with lying about sweatshop conditions in its overseas manufacturing plants.

In the 1993 case of Johnson v. Calvert, which revolved around surrogate's rights and what constitutes the "natural mother" of a child, Kennard was the only woman and dissenter in a 6-1 decision to enforce the surrogate's contract when she wrote "A pregnant woman is more than a mere container or breeding animal; she is the conscious agent of creation no less than the genetic mother, and her humanity implicated on a deep level.