Janice Brown Sworn In on State High Court

Janice Rogers Brown, a justice of the state Court of Appeal in Sacramento, was sworn in Thursday as an associate justice of the California Supreme Court, becoming its lone African American member.

Her appointment to the seven-member state high court by Gov. Pete Wilson was confirmed Thursday by the Commission on Judicial Appointments after a three-hour hearing in which her qualifications to serve on the court were defended.

Wilson praised Brown’s abilities and said his former legal affairs secretary will make an excellent addition to the court.

“Justice Brown has an incredible capacity for work and an incredible capacity for understanding both complex legal matters and the problems of everyday people,” Wilson said.

The State Bar panel that evaluates justices had rated Brown “not qualified” for the high court, citing lack of experience and a tendency to inject her political views into her appeals court rulings.

After her swearing-in, Brown thanked God and the bar panel, which she said had given her an opportunity for new “character development.”

In a more serious and sometimes rancorous discussion that lasted more than two hours, the panel’s rating was derided by two of the three commission members, who verbally ripped into the bar’s representative.

“It is beyond incredible that three-fourths of the people can come to that conclusion where someone has the experience that this woman has,” said Atty. Gen. Dan Lungren, a member of the Commission on Judicial Appointments.

Court of Appeal Justice Robert K. Puglia, another commission member, said the public perception is that the panel “dings conservatives” and is not accountable to anyone except other lawyers, which he dismissed as an “interest group.” Puglia, like Lungren a conservative, sits on the commission as the presiding justice of the state Court of Appeal in Sacramento.

Ronald M. George, the state’s new chief justice and chairman of the commission, said he had read all of the 155 opinions written by Brown during her 18 months on the appellate court, and noted that the language used, while strong, was not out of bounds for an appeals court justice. He also got a representative of the State Bar to acknowledge that members of the panel had reviewed only 40 of the opinions.

Rita Gunasekaran, chairwoman of the bar panel, known as the Commission on Judicial Nominee Evaluation, noted that the panel’s report did not include criticism of Brown unless members of the commission had verified that the critics had some personal knowledge of the charges they were making.

She said the commission, which was established by state law, found that Brown had no legal experience that distinguished her from the average California lawyer. The panel evaluates nominees in large part by sending out questionnaires to lawyers and judges, and Gunasekaran said the return rate was unusually low in Brown’s case.

When she attempted to list some of the detailed criticisms of Brown, which have never been released, Puglia interrupted and instructed her not to continue. The Times reported the contents of the report last week. Puglia said there should be a bar investigation into how the newspaper learned the contents of the confidential report.

Gunasekaran said the bar panel had no ulterior purpose behind its rating. (The panel found George to be “extraordinarily well qualified,” the bar’s highest rating.)

“If we are an inconvenience, I apologize for that,” Gunasekaran said. “But these are the rules by which we function. And we have done it to the best of our ability.”

Though a conservative, Brown cites liberals among her judicial heroes. In an interview with The Times before her appointment, she said she strongly admired former U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan, appointed by President Rutherford B. Hayes in 1877. Harlan initially favored slavery but became the most liberal member of the high court on civil rights and other cases.

Another jurist Brown cited favorably was Justice Felix Frankfurter, appointed to the high court in 1939. He was a liberal activist in private life but a strong advocate of judicial restraint, a concept that holds that judges should not decide cases according to their personal views.

Wilson, who wants to dismantle affirmative action programs, has said it would be insulting for anyone to assume he chose Brown because she is female and black. The two have a close, friendly relationship, and Brown once described herself as politically more conservative than Wilson.

She is the third woman among the current seven members of the court and the first African American justice since Allen E. Broussard, who retired in 1991.

Brown’s supporters have suspected that her negative rating may have stemmed from the bar’s dislike of her conservative views and liberals’ resentment of conservatives who are African American. But the bar’s evaluation committee included lawyers from conservative law firms and members of all races and both sexes, a spokesman said.

Of the 155 opinions Brown has written on the Court of Appeal, a handful have been published as precedent-setting. In one unpublished opinion about a lawsuit to reinstate a prison handicraft program, Brown derided the inmate who brought the suit in a sarcastic dissent.

In another case, brought by parents of a student who committed suicide, Brown wrote an opinion that said the boy’s school was not liable for having failed to detect his suicidal inclinations. Schools already are overburdened by “demands of due process” and other responsibilities, she wrote.

Law professors who have reviewed some of her opinions found them well written but disagreed over her use of strong language. What some saw as intemperate and amateurish was viewed as forthright and informative by others.

Before becoming Wilson’s legal affairs secretary in 1991, Brown worked as a senior associate at a large Sacramento law firm that handles political and governmental cases.

She served as deputy secretary and general counsel at the California Business, Transportation and Housing Agency in the late 1980s after working about eight years as a deputy state attorney general.

Brown earned her bachelor’s degree from Cal State Sacramento in 1974 and her law degree in 1977 from the UCLA School of Law.

She grew up in Alabama when it was still strictly segregated, and her parents refused to allow the family to visit places where blacks were required to use separate entrances or eat at separate counters. Her father left sharecropping and spent most of his career in the military.

Her first husband, an administrator at the state Department of Corrections, died of cancer eight years ago. She is now married to Dewey Parker, a jazz musician. She has a son, Nathan Allen Brown, 25, who is in the Air Force.

Brown, who faces voter confirmation for a 12-year term on the November 1998 ballot, will be paid $131,085 annually as an associate justice.