Interviews Released Posthumously Tell of Judge’s Life

“Sometimes I wonder why I never grew up to be a hater,” former California Supreme Court Justice Allen Broussard said in a new collection of interviews published a year after his death.

Broussard--the court’s second black justice, the bulwark of the liberal court of the early 1980s and the leading dissenter on the conservative court of the late 1980s--died of cancer Nov. 5, 1996, at age 67.

His reflections on his life and career, law and society, Chief Justices Rose Elizabeth Bird and Malcolm Lucas, Gov. George Deukmejian and others who crossed his path are contained in more than 200 pages of interviews with the University of California’s Regional Oral History Office. The series of interviews dates from shortly after his retirement from the court in 1991 through January 1996.

As a boy in segregated Lake Charles, La., Broussard rode his bike downtown before school to wash windows and sweep floors, and carried a broomstick to fend off white youths who would chase him with dogs and rocks on his way home.

At 16, his family moved to San Francisco, where his father worked as a longshoreman but where many jobs were closed to blacks--a later subject of picketing and pressure by Broussard as president of a college NAACP chapter.

“There were many things in my background which could have caused me to hate white people,” Broussard said. “I have race and ethnic pride, but I don’t have bitterness and animosity.”

One way he learned racial tolerance, he said, was through contact with the white nuns who taught at his all-black Roman Catholic high school.

Broussard got high grades but no offers from law firms after graduating from UC Berkeley in 1953. He landed a job as research attorney to Raymond Peters, a liberal appellate justice and future state Supreme Court justice who became one of his legal heroes.

He played a central role in his early years on the Supreme Court, to which he was appointed by Gov. Edmund G. “Jerry” Brown Jr. in 1981 after 17 years as an Alameda County trial judge.

It was a liberal court led by Bird, with whom Broussard remained close the rest of his life. She spoke at his memorial service last year, one day after breast cancer surgery.

He wrote some of the court’s most important rulings: strengthening the state’s authority to restrict water diversions, allowing strikes by non-safety public employees and requiring proof of intent to kill before receiving a death sentence.

Broussard spoke warmly of Bird, but observed that many had opposed Brown’s appointment of her in 1977, and “not all of them were her enemies.” She had no judicial experience and was relatively young, a liberal and a woman. Some found her difficult to work with, though her personal relationships improved over time, he said.

Still, at the height of the 1986 election campaign, when Bird and the liberal majority were voted out of office, the justices would hold their weekly conference in Bird’s chambers, and she “would come in with little goodies for everybody before we began working,” Broussard recalled.

Bird “wished that everything would have just gone away,” Broussard said. “I don’t think she intended to mount any real campaign. . . . I think that Rose Bird was a purist at heart, and really had a distaste for the politics and the campaigning that went into it.”

Broussard, who survived a small-scale conservative opposition campaign and won a 12-year term in 1982, said there was “a lot more at stake” in 1986 than the death penalty, the headline-grabbing issue.

There were “financial interests” who wanted a change in the court, farm interests who “felt that the court was more consumer-oriented than it should be” and contributed to the opposition campaign, and politicians worried about a future court-ordered reapportionment, he said.

Before her departure, Bird appointed Broussard acting chief justice, which put him on the commission that voted to confirm Deukmejian’s elevation of Lucas, his former law partner, to chief justice.

It reminded Broussard of his first run-in with Deukmejian, who as attorney general was on the commission that confirmed Broussard’s appointment in 1981. Deukmejian asked him and other Brown appointees about the death penalty and other issues before the court, and was unhappy with some of his answers, such as an observation that judicial activism is in the eye of the beholder, Broussard said.

The future governor voted against his confirmation, which passed 2 to 1, and opposed him in the retention election a year later.

When he considered Lucas’ nomination in 1987, Broussard said, he resisted the temptation to observe that if he followed Deukmejian’s policy, he would vote against confirmation, “simply because I had a different judicial philosophy.”

But Broussard said he knew, from serving with Lucas, that he was “a very able judge, and very well-qualified.”

Overall, Lucas, who retired in April 1996, was a successful chief justice. But the court has lost some of its prestige, Broussard said.

After 1986, “the California court tended to become a court that followed other courts, instead of being in the vanguard,” he said.

“The court is not in the crosswind of public discussion and controversy that it once was, but I don’t think that, among the scholars and those in the profession . . . it has the eminence that it once had.”