Word: traynor
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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...
...frenzy, the department's skillful crowd-control experts were quick to head off trouble before it started. Time and again the Berkeley cops have been called the most enlightened police force in the nation. Says no less a home-town citizen than California Supreme Court Chief Justice Rodger Traynor: "They know their town well; they know their townspeople well. I respect them as officers of the law in the largest sense...
...surprisingly, some California prosecutors and police chiefs take an exceedingly dim view of Traynor's court. "All this emphasis on individual rights has made the work of law enforcement more difficult and costly," complains Alameda (Oakland) County's veteran District Attorney Frank Coakley. By contrast, California Bar Association President John Sutro is a Traynor admirer. "You and I would like to see all crooks in jail," says Sutro. "So would Chief Justice Traynor. But this is a government of law not men, and the maintenance of that essential is the difference between our government and tyranny...
...California law that exonerates criminal acts committed "under an ignorance or mistake of fact which disproves any criminal intent." Having recently applied that rule to bigamy, the California Supreme Court scrapped 68 years of precedents and extended it still further in reversing Hernandez's conviction. Chief Justice Roger Traynor added: "This is not to say that the granting of consent by even a sexually sophisticated girl known to be less than the statutory age is a defense. We hold only that, in the absence of a legislative direction otherwise, a charge of statutory rape is defensible wherein a criminal...