Litigation

More Change At Cal Supremes

By Bruce Nye

The Recorder and San Jose Merc have both confirmed that Associate Justice Carlos Moreno is retiring effective February 28.  This means that incoming Governor Jerry Brown will get his first Supreme Court appointment within two months of taking office.  But it will hardly be his first such appointment ever.  During his first two terms, Brown appointed Chief Justice Rose Bird (who brought no judicial experience to the bench) and Associate Justices Cruz Reynoso and Joseph Grodin. 

The Bird court forged a lot of new territory in the world of tort law, creating some tort-reform "poster child" cases such as Bigbee v. Pacific Telephone and Telegraph (1983) 34 Cal.3d 49 (jury to decide if telephone company is liable for negligent siting of telephone booth -- remember those? -- when drunk driver runs into it and injures occupant) and Isaacs v. Huntington Memorial Hospital (1985) 38 Cal.3d 112 (allowing case to proceed against property owner for actions of third-party criminal with no evidence of prior similar incidents).  It also reversed something like 61 death penalty sentencings. 

In 1986, in a campaign co-led by social conservatives and business interests, all three of these appointees were denied reconfirmation, a first in the history of the California Supreme Court. Then-Governor Deukmajian filled the positions with conservatives, and the Court has been pretty moderate ever since.

CBL lives in Oakland, where Jerry Brown was mayor from 1999 to 2006.  Jerry faces one of the hardest tasks imaginable in governing a state with a projected $28 billion budget deficit over the next eighteen months.  His views and appointments have generally become more moderate and respectful of institutions in the  years since his first two terms as governor.  CBL will be flabbergasted if Governor Brown is willing to expend any political capital at all on controversial bench appointments.  But time will tell.

Full post as published by CalBizLit on January 06, 2011 (boomark / email).