Unjust Rap Sheet

Lawyers are trained to look for the holes in their opponents’ arguments, and Associate Justice Joseph R. Grodin of the California Supreme Court has found one big enough to drive cattle through in a critique of the court’s handling of cases important to business.

Grodin, it turns out, wasn’t even on the California Supreme Court when 14 of 23 decisions used in the critique as examples of an anti-business bias were handed down. The critical paper was put together by five attorneys at O’Melveny & Myers, an influential Los Angeles-based corporate-law firm. Grodin’s colleague, Justice Cruz Reynoso, was on the state’s top bench for only 11 of the decisions mentioned in the paper as grounds for opposing his reconfirmation and that of Grodin and Chief Justice Rose Elizabeth Bird.

Not only did the lawyers feature cases decided before Grodin and Reynoso joined the court in 1982, they also left out relevant information about some of the decisions in which the two justices did participate. Grodin, the first justice to speak out with a case-by-case defense, pointed especially to a decision involving an award of unemployment insurance to a medical technician. She was fired for refusing to carry out an assignment. What the lawyers didn’t include in their analysis, Grodin said, was that the woman declined to cut a tissue sample because she feared that her inexperience might harm a patient. That casts a vastly different light on the case. Grodin was on the court for that one, and concurred with Bird’s majority opinion.

The disregard for fairness, not to mention accuracy, of this position paper should rule it out as evidence of any kind. A document purportingto be a thoughtful legal analysis that emerges, on examination, as distortion is in keeping with much of the rest of the campaign against the justices.