Gorenfeld’s Divorce Plan Hit : After 18 Years on Bench, Jurist Still Sparks Legal Controversies

Leaning back behind the desk in his chambers recently, Torrance Superior Court Commissioner Abraham Gorenfeld hardly looked like someone charged with authoring “dangerous” ideas about the law that could be “a tragedy for the American family.”

Gorenfeld, 74, wore a rumpled sweater-vest and shook his head of thick gray hair as he described his 18 years as presiding officer in Torrance’s family law court. After overseeing two generations of the South Bay’s marriages, divorces and child custody battles, one of the most experienced jurists in the Torrance courthouse seemed rather bemused.

But dangerous? A threat to the family?

That’s how one prominent Los Angeles County Bar Assn. member described an article by Gorenfeld, published in a legal newspaper, which called for restructuring the state’s family law system. Other attorneys also said Gorenfeld’s plan was simplistic.

Gorenfeld prefers to think of his ideas as a breakthrough that could create huge savings for the county, and for husbands and wives, by lessening the adversary nature of most divorces.

And Gorenfeld has found at least one receptive ear: County Supervisor Deane Dana. He has asked the county counsel’s office to study the feasibility of implementing the commissioner’s ideas.

What Gorenfeld suggested in the article, published in the Los Angeles Daily Journal, is that divorce lawyers should stop acting like “gladiators and Shakespearean actors” and become conciliators. He said court costs and attorneys fees could be drastically reduced if the state took divorces out of the courts and appointed mediators to resolve issues ranging from division of community property to alimony and child support.

Gorenfeld said lawyers should be excluded from most family disputes because he said they tend to “fan the adversarial flames.” Mediators--guided by therapists, property appraisers and accountants--would do better than the courts at dividing community property and settling child custody disputes, he wrote.

The article threw Gorenfeld to the center of a quiet dispute in the county’s family law community. Advocating unpopular ideas is nothing new to a man who began his own law practice a half-century ago by representing union organizers, farm workers and community organizations. Gorenfeld, a self-described socialist, spent a career outside the political mainstream representing “the little guy.”

Colleagues said his left-wing ideology may have cost Gorenfeld a title he covets--Superior Court judge. He has been passed over for judicial appointments by conservative governors and may have been considered too old for an appointment when a liberal, Edmund G. Brown Jr., reached the Statehouse in 1975.

Friends said Gorenfeld has never been one to abandon his beliefs for personal gain. Whether protesting the abuse of a black classmate in law school, defending Watts residents accused of crimes in the 1965 riots or fighting for the free speech rights of a Nazi sympathizer, Gorenfeld said he tried to live by the words of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.: “Those who are not caught up in the actions and passions of their times will be judged as never having lived at all.”

Judges in Torrance like to call Gorenfeld “the best legal mind in the building” and consistently have assigned him to decide the often difficult arguments over the law that precede most trials.

But many lawyers who make their living from divorce cases are not fond of Gorenfeld.

Joseph Taback, former chairman of the Los Angeles County Bar Assn.’s family law section, called Gorenfeld’s ideas for rewriting the state’s divorce laws a dangerous oversimplification. In an interview, Taback said that lawyers and the long-established rules of evidence help to assure clients’ rights and “protect the American family.”

The proposal is “a half-cocked solution to find a quick cure-all,” Taback said. “Before we scrap the judicial system for people in crisis I think we ought to think long and hard about what we’re doing. You just don’t throw away constitutional safeguards.”

Gerald Lichtig, current chairman of the family law section, said the group will consider drafting a letter opposing the Gorenfeld proposal.

Gorenfeld’s response: “They’re just trying to protect their prestige and their revenue.”

And his ideas are generating interest at the county Hall of Administration, where officials are eager to remove cases from overcrowded courts and save money. The county faces two federal lawsuits that claim civil and criminal cases take too long to come to trial in Los Angeles County.

At Supervisor Dana’s behest, Assistant County Counsel Fred Bennett is reviewing Gorenfeld’s proposal. Bennett said that if mediation has merit, it could be included in a package of legislative proposals that the county sends each year to legislators in Sacramento.

Sees Self as Underdog

The avuncular Gorenfeld hopes his ideas will be adopted, but paints himself as a weary underdog who has lost his share of fights in a lifetime of taking on “the Establishment.”

“I’ve always felt more comfortable with the little guy,” he said.

Born in Leavenworth, Kan., the son of Russian-Jewish immigrant farmers, Gorenfeld moved with his family to Los Angeles in 1919 at the age of 5.

He adopted the politics of his father, a supporter of Eugene V. Debs, the Socialist Party’s perennial presidential candidate.

A precocious student, Abe Gorenfeld skipped two grades in elementary school, graduated from Fremont High School at 15 and UCLA at 20 before entering the USC School of Law.

He graduated second in the class of 1937.

“Abe was the brightest guy in our class. He was really a brain,” said David W. Williams, a USC classmate and now a senior U.S. District judge in Los Angeles.

Target of Discrimination

Williams said that as the school’s only black student, he and Gorenfeld, who is Jewish, were not eligible for USC legal fraternities or for jobs that most Los Angeles law firms reserved for white Protestants.

When a professor spoke disparagingly of blacks during a lecture, Gorenfeld led several students in complaining to the instructor. “I guess I felt too embarrassed to do it myself,” Williams recalled. “I was quite elated that my friends would take this guy on.”

Sol Price, another classmate, recalls that Gorenfeld made his political statements in small ways, too.

“When he rode on the street cars, he would always ask for a transfer and then try to give it away to someone on the street,” said Price, who went on to earn a fortune as founder of the Fed Mart and Price Club retail chains. “He would buy his gas from an independent station and then (take away) from the stations owned by the corporations by getting his air and water there. That’s how he fought his battles.”

Shortly after law school, Gorenfeld was offered a job with the state Department of Finance. But he said he was troubled and distracted by the issues of the day--the Depression, labor and civil rights struggles, and the reign of fascism and anti-Semitism in Europe.

“That was a critical point,” he said. “I decided I didn’t want to stay with the Establishment. I wanted to be active in civil rights.”

Defended Civil Rights

Gorenfeld turned down the state job to open his own law office, where he represented labor unions and donated time to the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People.

“Abe’s only problem, if you want to call it that, was that he felt going out and making money would taint him,” Price said.

Williams agreed: “I felt that with his brains and his brilliance that he should strive harder to get into the mainstream to put his talents to work.”

Gorenfeld said his first wife, from whom he was divorced in 1968 after 26 years of marriage, also had pushed him to follow a more traditional career path. But he resisted, saying that by staying outside of government and the big law firms he remained free to support his causes.

The young lawyer visited the produce farms that covered much of the South Bay before World War II, urging farm workers to unionize.

Ernestine Padron recalled Gorenfeld’s visits to her family’s small farm in Carson. Her parents and relatives worked for larger farmers in the area.

“They wanted to start a union. Conditions were pretty rough,” Padron said recently. Gorenfeld’s “whole thing was to try to bring better living to us, to help people who were less fortunate.”

Union Efforts Lauded

The unionization effort failed because of racial tensions among the Mexican, Filipino and Japanese workers. But Padron said Gorenfeld’s concern helped by providing “advice and education. It made our lives much more pleasant than they would have been.”

During World War II, he served for three years as a combat infantryman in the South Pacific.

Gorenfeld returned to Los Angeles in 1945 and, as a volunteer lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, quickly found himself in the middle of one of Los Angeles’ hottest disputes.

A Nazi sympathizer named Gerald L. K. Smith had applied for a permit to use the auditorium at now-defunct Polytechnic High School. The Los Angeles Board of Education turned him down.

Gorenfeld called the case “a real test” of his belief in civil liberties. Despite personal distaste for Smith’s ideas, Gorenfeld supported Smith’s right to speak. He won a court order that permitted Smith to address the assembly, then joined the estimated 10,000 protesters who picketed outside the school.

“He had the right to speak,” Gorenfeld said, “but we had the right to oppose what he was saying.

“That’s what it is all about,” he said. “It was summarized by Voltaire when he said, ‘I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.’ ”

Left Legal Practice

Shortly thereafter, Gorenfeld became disillusioned with his profession. He forsook the law for an assembly line at the General Motors plant in South Gate.

“I didn’t feel like a lawyer,” Gorenfeld recalled. “I felt closer to those (auto workers) because they were the kind of guys I had gone to war with. . . . I didn’t feel comfortable with lawyers.”

Gorenfeld also became a United Auto Workers organizer and tried to persuade his fellow workers that they should own the plant, run it as they saw fit and receive a greater share of the profits.

He did not find a receptive audience. “As long as people are getting along fairly well they think, ‘Why make any changes?’ ” Gorenfeld said. “After three years I said, ‘These guys aren’t ready for this kind of change, so why force it on them?’ ”

Gorenfeld returned to his law practice in downtown Los Angeles, and a career representing labor unions and workers.

Among his notable causes in the 1960s was the successful representation of the Citizens Committee to Save Elysian Park when the city of Los Angeles wanted to build a convention center on 63 acres of the park. Gorenfeld also helped the committee defeat Occidental Oil Corp.’s plan to drill wells in the park.

Volunteer Efforts

And after the 1965 Watts riots, Gorenfeld coordinated a panel of more than 40 volunteer attorneys who represented suspects arrested on suspicion of arson, burglary, looting and a variety of other charges.

“Abe was a very indefatigable worker,” said Fred Okrand, then a staff lawyer for the Southern California ACLU and later the organization’s legal director. “He did a great job of getting all those lawyers together. Gorenfeld was the main fellow.”

A governor’s commission appointed shortly after the riots found that of the 3,438 adults arrested, 1,061 had their cases dismissed or were acquitted.

Gorenfeld said the low conviction rate shows that the police had arrested most people without cause. “Anyone on the street in the vicinity (of the riots) was arrested,” he said. “It was a miscarriage of justice.”

By 1971, Gorenfeld felt he was burned out: “I said, ‘I’m going to get out of this turbulent way of living and get into something more peaceful.’ ”

And that year, the judges of the Los Angeles Superior Court appointed him a commissioner and he was assigned to Torrance.

A ‘Real Judge’

As a commissioner, Gorenfeld has virtually all the power of a judge, but lacks the salary--judges earn $84,765 a year, commissioners, $72,050--and the prestige of the higher office. “It does hurt me to have some young lawyer stand up in court and say, ‘I want to have this case heard by a real judge,’ ” Gorenfeld said. “I’ve always considered myself a real judge.”

Gorenfeld said he never expected to be named a judge by a Republican governor but was surprised at what happened to him while Brown, a political compatriot, was in office.

In 1978, a Superior Court judge in Los Angeles announced that he would retire at the end of his term and Gorenfeld prepared to run for the vacancy. His prospects seemed bright, particularly after he was favored in a straw poll by 72% of the members of the South Bay Bar Assn. Encouraged, Gorenfeld formed a campaign committee.

But the incumbent retired before the end of his term, leaving the office open for the governor to fill by appointment. Brown appointed Kenneth Gale, now on the bench in Compton, and Gorenfeld never came as close again.

J. Anthony Kline, now a justice on the state Court of Appeal in San Francisco, was Brown’s legal appointments secretary at the time.

Kline recently said that Gorenfeld lobbied for a judicial appointment in 1978, but that at 63 the commissioner was probably too old to get serious consideration.

Gorenfeld, said he has no plans to retire, and is hoping for at least one more victory--the adoption of his divorce mediation proposal.

But he is prepared to be disappointed.

“It is discouraging and frustrating,” Gorenfeld said, “when you have a program that you think will help people improve their lives and they’re just not interested.”

He chuckled:

“But I never quit. I hope I never do quit.”