About | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline
LOG IN
LOG IN

3 Cal. Sup. Ct. Hist. Soc'y Y.B. 165 (1996-1997)
Justice Frank Newman: Some Reflections

handle is hein.journals/cashsy3 and id is 177 raw text is: Justice Frank Newman: Some Reflections Joseph R. Grodin* Hastings College of the Law When Frank Newman decided to leave the California Supreme Court in 1982, and I inherited both his term of office and his chambers, he offered me some words of caution: there were cockroaches, he said, lurking in his bookcase, behind the multivolume treatise by Bernard Witkin on California law. No wonder, I thought to myself. Newman was not the sort of judge to find applicable law in a treatise. The cockroaches lived in a protected environment. When Governor Jerry Brown appointed Frank Newman to the Supreme Court in 1977, at age 60, he brought with him a rich background of experience in administrative law (which was his specialty in his early teaching years), in practical administration (having been dean at Boalt Hall), in government service (having served, among other things, as a member of the executive committee and chairman of the drafting commit- tee of the California Constitution Revision Commission) and in both the scholarship and the practice of international human rights. He brought with him also a personality full of youthful exuberance and enthusiasm about the law. When he left the court five years later, I believe his enthusiasm had dampened a bit. The day-to-day work of the court, and the nature of its caseload-both heavy and often mundane-proved to be not to his liking. One source of frustration was his inability to get his colleagues to accept principles of international law as a basis for decision, though in one opinion he did manage to work in a footnote reference to the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights. Anyone who has ever served as or around an appellate judge knows that it is both inaccurate and unfair to assess an appellate judge's work on a court on the basis solely of his or her written opinions. An appellate court is a collegial body, and its opinions are formed by interaction among

What Is HeinOnline?

HeinOnline is a subscription-based resource containing thousands of academic and legal journals from inception; complete coverage of government documents such as U.S. Statutes at Large, U.S. Code, Federal Register, Code of Federal Regulations, U.S. Reports, and much more. Documents are image-based, fully searchable PDFs with the authority of print combined with the accessibility of a user-friendly and powerful database. For more information, request a quote or trial for your organization below.



Short-term subscription options include 24 hours, 48 hours, or 1 week to HeinOnline.

Purchase Access

Contact us for annual subscription options:

Contact Us

Already a HeinOnline Subscriber?

Log In

profiles profiles most