Word: traynor
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...half the story. Equally vital is the quality of California's high court, which currently includes such able men as Justices Mathew O. Tobririer, Paul Peek and Raymond E. Peters. Most important of all is the brilliant legal mind of Gibson's successor, Chief Justice Roger J. Traynor, 65. Traynor, says Illinois' own distinguished Justice Walter V. Schaefer, is "the nation's No. 1 state judge...
...Berkeley law student, Traynor simultaneously taught political science and edited the California Law Review. He graduated in 1927 with both Ph.D. and J.D. degrees. As a young tax expert, he drafted many of California's revenue laws while teaching at his alma mater; he served as deputy state attorney general and became the state's first sales-tax administrator. In addition, he helped draft the new Federal Revenue...
Appointed to the California Supreme Court at 40, Traynor has since written 775 opinions on every imaginable subject; many of his 156 dissents later became U.S. Supreme Court doctrine. Traynor is aptly called "a law professor's judge"-he writes not only acute, balanced opinions but reams of scholarly law-review articles as well. Most important, he is undaunted by the cautious rule of stare decisis (adhere to precedents). Always he asks: what is the fair, practical policy for today...
Needling Washington. Unlike most state courts, Traynor's is quite willing to reinterpret the federal Constitution when the U.S. Supreme Court appears slow to do so. Speaking for his court in 1948, for example, Traynor boldly ignored an 1883 Supreme Court ruling and tossed out California's antimiscegenation law on the ground that it violated the 14th-Amendment right to equal protection of the laws. Not until 1964 did the Supreme Court reach the same result in McLaughlin v. Florida, and even then it did not quite overrule the 1883 precedent. But virtually all experts predict that Traynor...
Speaking for the California court in the Martinez-Aranda case, Chief Justice Roger Traynor took his cue from Jackson and reversed Aranda's conviction on the ground that a jury cannot "segregate evidence into separate intellectual boxes." In short, said Traynor, if A confesses that he committed criminal acts with B, the jury cannot "effectively ignore the inevitable conclusion that B has committed those same criminal acts with A." From now on, ruled Traynor, California courts must handle codefendant confessions according to new procedures...