Court to Hear Challenge to Use of UC Fees : Education: Group of Berkeley students objects to having the money support political causes. Others defend activity charges as furthering the exchange of ideas.

The state Supreme Court on Thursday agreed to decide whether University of California students can be forced to pay activity fees that are used for political causes and lobbying that they may not support.

The justices set aside a state Court of Appeal ruling last January that upheld the use of mandatory fees for political activities, saying the funding served the university’s educational purpose.

The outcome could have a broad effect on California’s college and university campuses, where mandatory student activity fees have long been imposed in varying forms, attorneys said.

In a brief order, the high court said it would hear, at an undetermined date, a constitutional challenge of the fees’ use brought by a group of UC Berkeley students. The fee--$21 annually--funds about 150 groups and activities, ranging from the environmentalist Greenpeace to campus yell leaders to the Gay and Lesbian Union.

The students brought suit contending that using mandatory fees to further causes that some on campus oppose violates the 1st Amendment right to free speech. The suit also challenged the use of fees to lobby the Legislature and the city of Berkeley on issues ranging from abortion rights to discrimination in housing rentals.

Anthony T. Caso of the Pacific Legal Foundation, an attorney for the students, expressed hope that the high court would strike down the use of fees for political purposes. “We think it is very important that individual students be freed from this compelled financial support of other people’s ideas,” he said.

Foundation lawyers previously won a ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court preventing the mandatory dues that lawyers pay to the State Bar from being used for political purposes.

Mark Himelstein of San Francisco, an attorney for the UC Berkeley student government organization that collects the fees, defended the distribution of the money to campus groups, noting that the funds do not support a single cause but are intended to further the exchange of a variety of ideas in a campus setting.

“This helps tie students to the public issues of the day, over and above what they are learning in the classroom,” Himelstein said. “No student is forced to associate with any particular student group.”

In other action Thursday, the high court:

* Was asked to reinstate Proposition 68, a 1988 campaign-spending limits initiative that the justices struck down because it received fewer votes than Proposition 73, a conflicting reform measure on the same ballot. Later, most of Proposition 73 was held unconstitutional in federal court. Lawyers for Common Cause told the high court that it should revive Proposition 68 because, with Proposition 73 now invalid, there no longer is a conflict, and voters were entitled to reforms that they had endorsed.

* Refused to hear a constitutional challenge to California’s 1987 hate crimes law, which provides up to a year in jail for the use of force or threats to interfere with an individual’s legal rights because of race, religion, national origin or sexual orientation. Mark Shane Lashley, a white man convicted of a racially motivated shooting of a black man in Playa del Rey, contended that the civil rights law invoked in his case was impermissibly vague.

* Let stand an appellate court ruling overturning a rare action by a Santa Clara Superior Court judge that rejected a jury’s verdict of death and reduced the sentence of convicted killer Mark Crew to life in prison without parole. The appellate panel said that Judge John Schatz had improperly based his action on the belief that Crew’s case was not as aggravated as those of other capital cases he had heard.