Prop. 103 Hearing a Test for Judge : Auto insurance: Miriam Vogel, relatively new on the bench, will decide whether a freeze on increases in rates should stand.

In the Proposition 103 auto insurance cases she has been hearing, Superior Court Judge Miriam A. Vogel--not wanting to waste time--hasn’t allowed the various attorneys to make opening statements.

Having read all the legal briefs and thoroughly studied the situation beforehand, Vogel usually plunges straight into the heart of the argument. She tells the attorneys at the outset what she is thinking of doing and challenges them to argue her out of it, if they can. She then listens intently, engages in polite but pungent verbal exchanges with the lawyers, and, if she feels an argument is good, frequently alters her views.

It is characteristic of the proceedings in Judge Vogel’s downtown Los Angeles courtroom that neither side has much of an idea what she is finally going to do until just before she does it. Her hearings have many unexpected twists and turns, and yet the appellate record of four years shows that when she has finally made up her mind, she usually is affirmed by higher courts.

Vogel, 49, is an independent-minded Republican appointed by Gov. George Deukmejian on Dec. 23, 1985, just five days after she had practiced law the 10-year minimum required to be eligible to be named a Superior Court judge.

Today, she faces one of the most important hearings in her comparatively short judicial career.

It will be up to her to decide whether Insurance Commissioner Roxani Gillespie’s statewide freeze on increases in auto insurance rates, imposed in October, will be allowed to stand. Vogel also must decide whether to let the Farmers group of companies go ahead with a rate increase, which was announced shortly before Gillespie announced her freeze.

On the fate of the freeze rides Gillespie’s most important strategy for placating the state’s ratepayers, already impatient at her slow pace in implementing Proposition 103. The insurance commissioner has stated several times that she doesn’t expect most ratepayers to ever see Proposition 103’s promised rate rollbacks, but she hopes that her freeze will prove a satisfactory palliative.

In previous hearings, Vogel has said repeatedly she thinks it is important to protect the state’s consumers. But she has also said she wants to make sure the insurance companies can recoup financially, if their frozen rates are later judged to be inadequate to assure them the “fair rate of return” the state Supreme Court has said they should have. Vogel’s decision after today’s hearing may revolve around arguments on the recoupment issue.

As supervising judge of the department that deals with writs and receivers--requests for restraining orders and injunctions in a host of actions that are among the most complex and controversial to come before the Los Angeles County courts--Vogel is often in the hot seat, constrained to reach a determination as to what to do in an urgent situation quickly and without full-blown trials.

But there may be more lawyers, representing more companies and more consumer groups, in her courtroom today than she has seen in any single proceeding before. Gillespie’s special attorney, Karl Rubinstein, has invited all 700 companies doing business in the state to send representatives.

The way to the bench was not an easy one for Vogel. As Miriam Friedfeld, the only child of a movie studio electrician, she grew up in modest economic circumstances on Los Angeles’ Westside and quit Santa Monica College at 18 to get married.

She was in her early 30s, divorced, raising two boys and working full time as a secretary for an architect before she entered law school, after getting her college degree through UCLA Extension.

Continuing to work as a secretary all the way through what was then the Beverly School of Law and is now the Whittier College School of Law, Vogel nonetheless graduated magna cum laude and second in her class. After graduation, she obtained a clerkship with an associate justice of the state Court of Appeal, Robert S. Thompson.

Thompson, now retired and living in La Jolla, calls her “one of the two best clerks who worked for me” in his 11 years on the Court of Appeal, noting that the other clerk also became a Superior Court judge. “She was incredibly hard working, and very, very smart,” Thompson said of Vogel.

After the clerkship, Vogel worked for three prestigious Los Angeles law firms, the last of them as a full partner, before being named to the Superior Court by Deukmejian.

At first she was assigned to the criminal courts, where she freely acknowledged she had a lot to learn. But this lasted only one year. In 1987, she was assigned to the Superior Court’s law and motions department; in 1988 to writs and receivers, and then this year became supervising judge of both of these law departments.

In these functions, what other jurists and quite a few lawyers regard as Vogel’s high intelligence has come into full flower. A colleague, Superior Court Judge Diane Wayne, remarks: “She is one of the few people I call for advice when I have a problem with legal procedure.”

Noting that Vogel often puts in long days on the job and much time on the weekends, a family member says: “She is a person who has always worked very hard, and whenever she starts something, she does everything that needs to be done and does it herself.”

In the last two years, she has been involved in such diverse decisions as keeping a school district from closing a high school in the Palos Verdes Peninsula, allowing power plant construction to go forward in the Santa Clarita Valley, rejecting moves by developers to narrow the zone of Coastal Commission building restrictions and ordering the Los Angeles Harbor Department to disclose more financial information about its leases.

What comes through in Vogel’s record is her lack of ideological bias, a strong vein of common sense and a determination to be fair. She shows in her courtroom little tolerance for either bureaucratic or corporate legal argument for its own sake, often reminding lawyers that she is after a workable solution. Vogel, when it is practical, also would rather get the parties to stipulate to an agreement between themselves instead of enunciating her own decision.

Now married to Charles S. Vogel, a former Superior Court judge and former president of the Los Angeles County Bar Assn., Vogel lives between Brentwood and Pacific Palisades. But she keeps in her chambers a photograph of the tiny house in which she grew up, with the structure sitting underneath a huge advertising billboard for Lucky Lager beer.

Referring to the picture, she has said: “I like nice things, but I like to keep my perspective.”