Word: traynor
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...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...
...With Traynor heartily concurring, in 1963 Chief Justice Gibson took California far beyond the Supreme Court's current doctrine that Northern school boards may or may not remedy de facto segregation, as they please. In a still unique state-court reading of the 14th Amendment, Gibson ruled in Jackson v. Pasadena that California school boards can no longer merely refrain from discrimination. "It is up to the school boards," he said, "to eliminate racial imbalance in schools regardless of its cause." In 1963 Traynor spoke for his court in issuing another U.S. precedent: the idea that even non-negligent...
True Purposes. For decades, most states so neglected criminal justice that in recent years the U.S. Supreme Court has intervened with a vengeance. Predictably, California is a bright exception. Often in far-reaching opinions by Traynor, the California court has been among the first to modernize the legal definition of criminal insanity (1953), to hold that an indigent whose court-appointed lawyer has botched his job is entitled to a new trial (1963), to ring new safeguards around the use of co-defendant confessions at joint trials (1965), and to defy the odd Supreme Court rule that police...