The Bench Loses a Giant

Stanley Mosk became a judge the year after California officials had summarily shipped off tens of thousands of Japanese Americans to remote internment camps. It was 1943, a time of restrictive covenants that barred white homeowners in many neighborhoods from selling to blacks, Asians, Mexicans or Jews.

When Mosk died Tuesday, after more than half a century on the bench, including 37 years as a justice of the California Supreme Court, he had perhaps more than any other single jurist remade California law--for the better. Mosk, 88, served longer than anyone else in the state Supreme Court’s 151-year history, authoring an astonishing 1,688 rulings. But was not numbers that measured Mosk but rather the caliber of his mind and his commitment to individual liberties.

Smart, eloquent and principled, Mosk might well have become chief justice, but the political timing was never right. He held fast to certain truths and lived long enough to see his faith vindicated. Mosk’s opinions applied state environmental laws to private developers and widened the ability of injured plaintiffs to sue. His trailblazing decisions outlawing state housing covenants and peremptory challenges designed to eliminate minority or female jurors in criminal cases became federal constitutional law when the U.S. Supreme Court later reached the same conclusions.

He was a gifted and erudite writer, often teasing colleagues by tossing into opinions words like “acroteleueic” (it means last part), guaranteed to send them scurrying to their dictionaries.

In 1983, the black robe that Mosk took to the California Supreme Court finally wore out. He parted with the ragged robe reluctantly, and in his “Eulogy to a Robe” he recalled that former colleagues who gave him the garment had sewn into its collar the phrase “Libertas per Justitiam,” liberty through justice. Those words are a fitting epitaph for Mosk. They should now guide Gov. Gray Davis in naming as Mosk’s replacement a jurist no less committed to fairness and liberty.