Word: traynor
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Pioneer Retires California's Chief Justice Roger J. Traynor is widely regarded as one of the greatest judges who never sat on the U.S. Supreme Court. Regret is hardly in order. A fount of creative federalism. Traynor has spent 30 years writing 930 opinions that often put the California Supreme Court far ahead of the U.S. Supreme Court on issues ranging from racial discrimination to contract doctrine. Now almost 70, Traynor has just announced that he will retire...
...Traynor's exit enables California's Governor Ronald Reagan to make his first appointment to the nation's most aggressive, progressive state court. Whether Reagan can "balance" that court's liberalism, which he has often deplored, remains to be seen. Traynor. a member of the court since 1940 and chief justice since 1964, and most of his fellow judges have carved a pioneering record that may be hard to erase...
...Unconstitutional Voters. Back in 1948, Traynor spoke for his court in voiding California's law against interracial marriage on the ground that it violated the equal-protection clause of the 14th Amendment. The U.S. Supreme Court agreed-19 years later. In 1955, Traynor held that California police could not use illegally obtained evidence in court, a rule that paved the way for the Supreme Court's later extension of that standard to all the states in Mapp v. Ohio (1961). Rulings by Traynor entitled both sides to examine one another's evidence before a criminal trial. Traynor...
...Undaunted by popular pressure, Traynor once held that a 2 to 1 majority of California's voters had violated the U.S. Constitution. Out went the results of a 1964 referendum that entitled homeowners to sell or rent to anyone they pleased-a not-so-roundabout way of legalizing discrimination against Negroes. The Supreme Court affirmed Traynor's opinion, and in 1968 Congress outlawed racial discrimination in most U.S. housing. An earlier Traynor opinion may some day prove equally prescient for the nation. Almost seven years ago, he joined his court in ordering California school boards to take positive...
...doctrinaire liberal, Traynor often opposed making new criminal-law rights retroactive for prisoners already in jail; he delivered speeches urging Californians to have more respect for the police. Some of his most important decisions had nothing to do with race or crime. One Traynor precedent made manufacturers strictly liable when their products injure consumers; another held that proving "fault" by one spouse in divorce cases is cruel and irrelevant when a marriage is dead. The California legislature has just passed a law permitting divorces on the ground of "irreconcilable differences...