Courts and Bar Left Hanging

The Legislature adjourned this week leaving two urgent legal matters unresolved: money for the now moribund State Bar of California and money promised to the state trial courts to help streamline their operations. A last-minute flurry of negotiations had raised hopes that Gov. Pete Wilson would at last embrace a compromise to salvage such vital bar functions as lawyer discipline. But in the session’s final, chaotic moments, the proposal stalled and died. The governor blames unyielding supporters of the bar. Assemblyman Bob Hertzberg (D-Sherman Oaks), who took the lead on bar reform, says Wilson got around to focusing on the matter far too late, just hours before adjournment.

The governor’s office calls the stalemate “regrettable.” “Unconscionable” seems a more accurate description. No legislative fix is possible until the lawmakers reconvene. Some hope that Chief Justice Ronald M. George of the California Supreme Court can allocate funds to keep the bar’s discipline system afloat in the interim. But that clearly cannot be counted on.

The governor’s beefs with the bar are that lawyers’ dues are too high, the bureaucracy is bloated and its activities too partisan. Wilson triggered the crisis last October by vetoing the bar’s annual dues bill, leaving the constitutional agency with dwindling funds.

The breakdown came in June when the bar, out of money, had to lay off hundreds of employees, shutting down its discipline system. Thousands of complaints against lawyers are now stacked up, uninvestigated, in the bar’s San Francisco offices. Lamentably, the pile is certain to grow higher. How many unscrupulous or incompetent lawyers have been emboldened by the shutdown? It’s troubling to contemplate.

The failed funding for trial court modernization was another train wreck that could have been avoided. The money--$50 million annually--was promised as part of a bigger deal last year to restructure trial court funding. Courts that agree to unify, to merge their superior and municipal courts, were to be able to apply for funds to add law clerks, new research capabilities and upgrade computers and for other purposes.

The newly passed state budget does offer courts in Los Angeles and some other counties additional, badly needed funds for operations, but Wilson could still veto that money; that clearly would be a mistake.

In January, returning legislators should restore the funds as an act of faith with voters who embraced court unification at the polls last June.