A Dear friend of the court

In March 2007, Chief Justice Ronald M. George and Chief Supervising Attorney Jake Dear were walking in Civic Center Plaza when a skateboarder swerved across their path and ran over Dear's foot.

"No apology, I guess," George called out sternly, prompting the reckless rider to stop and say he was sorry, according to a published account of the incident. Later the chief reflected, "I wish that justice could always be dispensed that quickly."

The story illustrates the bond between Dear, who died June 5 of pancreatic cancer at age 69, and George--one of the three chief justices Dear served across the arc of his distinguished 40-year career at the California Supreme Court.

"Working with Jake was a most pleasurable experience for me and a truly collaborative effort, with each of us able to convince the other of the merit of something not previously considered," George wrote in 2023, when Dear retired.

Chief Justice Patricia Guerrero said that "Jake was more than just a brilliant attorney. He cared deeply about the court as an institution, including all his coworkers. Through the connections he made, generations of attorneys benefited from his sincerity, curiosity, intelligence, and good humor."

Dear himself believed that he and his staff carried forward a longstanding practice that ensured high quality opinions. As he wrote in an article about the comparative influence of the 50 U.S. supreme courts:

"... since the 1940s the California Supreme Court's internal culture has supported independent research beyond the briefing. That tradition continues today in most chambers and among most of the court's professional attorneys who work directly for each justice by drafting calendar memoranda and opinions. The resulting court opinions often survey the field and analyze issues in depth, thus making them more likely to be viewed by a court of another jurisdiction as persuasive authority."

Dear worked for three chief justices--Malcolm M. Lucas, George and Tani G. Cantil-Sakauye--as an indispensable behind-the-scenes influence.

Surviving are his wife Maureen and their son Adam. Dear's death led to an outpouring of praise, grief, and appreciation.

"We are heartbroken for his wife and soulmate Mo, their son, his wife and the rest of his family," Cantil-Sakauye wrote in an "In memoriam" message. "We ourselves are bereft that Jake now lives only in our hearts and memories."

Dear's talent for finding little-known yet on-point precedent was unmatched, George said. In one case presenting difficult and novel legal questions, he recalled, "Jake's research uncovered some dispositive legislative history and case law dating back to the 1860s and the 1880s that had eluded the parties' very experienced and highly respected counsel, and that caused the courts to solicit supplemental briefing from the parties."

Beginning in 1982 as an extern and then working as an annual law clerk for Justice Stanley Mosk, Dear's four-decade career eclipsed even Mosk's 37 years at the court. Dear also was chambers clerk for Justice Joseph R. Grodin.

Justices came and went, but Dear remained on duty, an embodiment of the court's institutional memory. As Cantil-Sakauye put it: "Jake Dear -- his name, identity, and influence -- is synonymous with the excellence and integrity of the California Supreme Court."

Curious and meticulous, operating from his fifth-floor office in the Earl Warren Building, he attained an outsized reputation as an authority on the court's history and influence and as a go-to fount of research, analysis, and incisive writing.

"He was highly trusted by the justices for his scholarship, intellect and high standards," emailed Daniel M. Kolkey, the president emeritus of the California Supreme Court Historical Society, where Dear was an editor of the group's publication.

"Jake was such a stickler for high standards in adhering to style and usage guidelines that he once complimented me for italicizing the name of the Society's semiannual publication in a mere email that I sent him!" added Kolkey, a retired Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP partner and a former associate justice on the 3d District Court of Appeal.

"But that was Jake--no detail was too small to be ignored, and no point too insignificant to be vetted. For Jake, perfection was not merely a goal; it was his North Star."

He was also fun to be around, said Michael A. Futterman, a law school classmate, longtime friend, and the lead name partner at San Francisco's Futterman Dupree Dodd Croley Maier LLP.

"He had great natural enthusiasms and a nice sense of humor," said Futterman, who served on the law review at UC Davis School of Law while Dear was editor in chief. "He also had a serious, scholarly bent and he was a very hardworking guy."

Dear, the son of an engineer and a special education teacher, put himself through school painting apartment buildings in Sacramento and Davis. He met his wife, attorney Maureen (Mo) Bertorelli Dear, in corporations class when--in his telling--she was able to answer a question that eluded him in a case involving the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus.

"After class, we went directly to get coffee and doughnuts at the Silo," Dear said later. "We were engaged a year later."

Last week Mo Dear recalled that at their wedding a friend gave them a vase and advised Jake to keep it filled. "So, every Wednesday, Jake would go to the farmers market at the Civic Center and buy me a huge bouquet of flowers. Walking to our home from the bus stop the neighbors would comment on how beautiful it was that he bought me flowers each week."

Dear became an oenophile and learned a lot about French wines. Futterman said he was once dining in the south of France when the restaurateur suggested an obscure bottle from a nearly unheard-of varietal. "I photographed the label and sent it to Jake, who immediately came back with a strong recommendation and the news that he had a deal with a San Francisco importer to get him a few bottles each year."

To pay for his wine hobby, Dear graded exams for the State Bar. "We'd take the same Golden Gate transit bus to work, and I'd see Jake hunched in his seat working on his side hustle," Futterman said.

Adam Dear recalled a father-son Amtrak trip to Chicago where they took in a Giants v. Cubs game, only to be stuck in seats behind a massive I-beam.

"I remember laughing about this with my dad and continuing to laugh about it for years to come. I don't remember who won the game, but looking back, it does not seem to matter. This is just one of many examples of my dad's special way of making memories not just for himself, but for everyone around him."

On the job, Dear was the court's go-to authority on almost everything. Assigned to help prepare the court's most significant and complex cases, he helped design the justices' analytical approach to intricate capital appeals. He worked on worker classification issues, helping put in place the legal framework for employment law's rules on how workers' jobs are defined. And he assisted justices with the constitutional underpinnings of same-sex marriage issues in California.

Dear also helped make the court's workings more transparent as a steward, guardian, and promoter of its reputation.

In January 2009, as volatile social issues simmered with the inauguration of Barack Obama as the first Black U.S. president and gay rights in peril following voter approval of the Proposition 8 same-sex marriage ban, Dear and others scheduled a public airing of the issues' constitutional backdrop.

The court's earlier landmark same-sex marriage ruling, In re: Marriage Cases, 43 Cal.4th 757 (2008), had been undone by the voters. The justices were hearing demands from Gov. Jerry Brown and many Californians to declare Prop. 8 unconstitutional. Ever protective of his institution's standing, Dear found a way to air current events through a look at the past.

"Civil and Uncivil Constitutional Rights in California: The Early Legal History" was a Dear-designed colloquium sponsored jointly by the Bar Association of San Francisco and the Supreme Court Historical Society. The program showed how the high court grappled with civil rights through the lens of the mid-1880s.

Dear also promoted the court through an imaginative work of scholarship. In 2007 he and Edward W. Jessen, the court's reporter of decisions, published a law review article analyzing the comparative influence of the nation's 50 supreme courts.

Dissatisfied with the standard practice of counting the frequency with which each court is cited by others--because frequency need not equal influence--Dear and Jessen found a way to count only so-called "followed" citations, those that reflect positively on the prior cited case as controlling or persuasive authority.

Next, Dear and Jessen persuaded LexisNexis, the provider of Shepard's Citations Service, to identify all opinions since 1940 from each state high court that Shepard's found to have been followed by a different state court.

Crunching the data, Dear and Jessen showed that over the prior 65 years through 2005, more than 24,000 state high court cases had been followed at least once and that California led by 1,269 decisions. Washington and Colorado followed with 942 and 848, respectively.

"Our preliminary results show that over the course of several decades, the California Supreme Court has been the most followed state high court, and that trend continues," Dear and Jessen concluded.

Their study, "'Followed Rates' and Leading State Cases, 1940-2005," drew an admiring New York Times article and some unconvincing carping from other states. "But the study's methodology seems smart and hard to quarrel with," The Times remarked.

The authors included a section on "most followed" California cases--an example of Dear's thoroughness and his regard for persuasive precedent. Dillon v. Legge, 68 Cal.2d 728, a seminal 1968 opinion establishing the tort of negligent infliction of emotional distress, had, by 2005, been followed 20 times, more than any other opinion from any jurisdiction.

Jessen gave Dear most of the credit. "He was gracious enough to make me coauthor, but Jake was the driving force," Jessen emailed last week. "My primary role was to convince and work with Lexis to provide the 'data mining' from the Shepard's database. ... But Jake was a guardian of the court's reputation in the public arena."

Dear's strong interest in the court's past led in 1998-1999 to a detailed account of its many locales. "Historic Sites of the California Supreme Court" showed that during its first 75 years the justices relocated at least 18 times. Dear wrote the piece with "Levin," identified with a single name as a senior staff attorney in Justice Fred K. Morrison's chambers at the 3d District Court of Appeal.

They had fun finding antique accounts of the itinerant court's exit from Sacramento in 1879 where critics complained "its climate and whisky was bad." Some argued it should move to Los Angeles, "about the only place in the state where you can get wine that is not adulterated."

The justices themselves settled on a building at 640 Clay Street in San Francisco, with excursions to hear cases both at the capitol and in L.A.

In 1989, during the Loma Prieta earthquake, "an enormous bronze ceiling light fixture crashed down on the floor near Chief Justice Lucas's desk," Dear recounted.

Finally, in 1999, the court moved into the Earl Warren Building. "The well-traveled California Supreme Court is now firmly rooted and continues serving the People from its 'historic' home," Dear concluded.

By then, he'd been on the job for 17 years.