The California Supreme Court's secret 1986 drama

The California Supreme Court took a pivotal right turn in 1986 as the successful soft-on-crime campaign against Chief Justice Rose E. Bird drove the liberal jurist and two colleagues from the bench.

It was the most divisive chapter in the modern history of California's courts.

Emotion-driven TV ads blasted Bird's record of 61 death penalty reversals. One showed a murdered 12-year-old girl's mother as she asked voters to evict Bird, Joseph R. Grodin and Cruz Reynoso, all of whom had voted to overturn the killer's death sentence. 

While the retention election campaign unfolded in public, an unseen drama took place within the Supreme Court itself.

Gov. George Deukmejian's two conservative appointees made an unconventional move in an unsuccessful effort to save Grodin from ouster at the polls. That little-known tale gets a fresh telling in the new issue of the California Supreme Court Historical Society Review. 

Far from a staid journal of musty case studies, the spring-summer 2026 edition of the Review also contains a lively account of how the young Stanley Mosk, then California's attorney general and a civil rights advocate, helped integrate the PGA after jazz singer Billy Eckstein introduced him to excluded Black golf star Charlie Sifford in 1959 at the Hillcrest Country Club in Los Angeles.

Sifford informed Mosk that the PGA had a Caucasian-only clause in its bylaws that barred him from PGA events. Mosk was shocked that after World War II's racial atrocities an American sports league would maintain such a rule. He launched an investigation and a lawsuit that put public and judicial pressure on the PGA. In 1961 the golf association eliminated its Caucasian-only clause. In 1967 Sifford won his first official PGA tournament, the Greater Hartford Open.

"It's the stories behind California law and policy and the people involved that I'm interested in," said the CSCHS Review's new editor J. Clark Kelso, a veteran law professor and judicial administration authority. "Unlike traditional law reviews, we don't feature doctrinal analyses of California law."

Kelso said he spotted a 2024 book by Peter May, "Changing the Course: How Charlie Sifford & Stanley Mosk Integrated the PGA," and enlisted sports law professor Alicia C. Jessop to write up the account for the Review.  

There's also a larger story about how Mosk, as attorney general, and his successors turned the AG's shop into a civil rights powerhouse. Kelso asked three state Department of Justice attorneys, Angela Sierra, Michael L. Newman and Catherine Z. Ysrael, to tell that saga.

And there is a series of tributes to Grodin, who died in 2025.

One of the tributes contains the insider's report of that 1985 retention election and the maneuvering by his political foes to keep Grodin on the bench. It is told by Jake Dear, the court's former chief supervising attorney, who retired in 2023 after a 40-year career, including a stint as chambers attorney for Grodin from 1985 to 1987. Dear died last month.

Dear writes that Deukmejian, who had long made Bird a target over her death penalty reversals in capital cases, spearheaded the campaign against her. The effort, Dear relates, was financed by interests displeased by Bird's holdings in business decisions.

Deukmejian was being advised that he could reshape the court with three replacement nominations instead of just one if he also called for the expulsion of Grodin and Reynoso.

While the governor pondered that move, Deukmejian's conservative appointees, Edward A. Panelli and Malcolm M. Lucas, "personally implored him not to come out against Justice Grodin," writes Dear. "Why? Because, they related, Grodin was someone who kept an open mind and was willing to consider the possibility that he was wrong and that others might be right."

Dear adds of Grodin, "He aspired to be liberal in the sense of keeping an open and respectful mind ... So, it's unsurprising that his conservative colleagues valued his contributions to the court's deliberations and opinions ... And yet we all know the unprecedented--and, so far, unrepeated--result. The governor did target him. All three targeted justices were turned out. And we were all deprived of the further direct contribution that Justice Grodin would have made to the court's work."

Dear wrote that he learned of the episode when it occurred and later confirmed it with a former court colleague who also witnessed the events.

Dear doesn't say so, but if Grodin had remained on the court, he along with the liberals Mosk and Allen E. Broussard would have more nearly balanced the bench. Instead, Deukmejian was able to elevate Lucas to chief justice and replace the three liberals who'd lost the retention election with conservatives Marcus M. Kaufman, John A. Arguelles, and David N. Eagleson. That new 5-2 law-and-order supermajority sharply shifted the court's ideological direction for the first time in decades.

The Lucas Court affirmed more than 90% of the 225 death penalty cases it reviewed over the next decade.

In 1996, Gov. Pete Wilson, a moderate Republican, appointed Ronald M. George to be chief justice. George moved the court toward the political center. It took until 2011 before Gov. Jerry Brown--in his second stint as California's chief executive--appointed to the high court liberal law professor Goodwin H. Liu, the first of several picks that again swung the balance leftward.

It had been Brown in 1977, during his first governorship, who named Rose Bird to the court and set the stage for the Malcolm Lucas counterrevolution.

"Nineteen eighty-six was a key moment for the court and for developing trends in California law," Kelso said. "You can divide a lot of cases into pre- and post-1986. It was such a dramatic shift, and Jake Dear's vignette is a wonderful view into the way a collegiate court works."

Kelso's predecessor, journalist and former Stanford Law School research fellow Molly Selvin, ended her run as editor in chief with the Review's spring-summer 2025 edition. It's devoted to a lengthy account of the court-enforced racial and ethnic covenants in housing contracts that created all-white neighborhoods throughout California.

The article's author, appellate attorney Robert S. Wolfe of Hermosa Beach, is among the Review's most prolific contributors. 

"California led the way as the first state in the country to judicially enforce these searing limitations on who could buy and sell houses," Wolfe said. "But a determined cadre of dedicated and resilient California attorneys, primarily African American, also led the way in a protracted battle to make housing available to all people and races."

Wolfe, a former supervising judicial attorney at the 4th District Court of Appeal in Santa Ana, leads occasional Law Walk tours of legally significant spots in Downtown Los Angeles near Pershing Square. Clarence Darrow's local office was in the penthouse of the Higgins Building. The current Hall of Justice at Spring and Temple streets is on the site of the Murrieta Building in the 1880s, where two upper-floor courtrooms were replaced by a brothel that attracted a legal and political clientele, according to Wolfe.

When the madam, Pearl Morton, moved her establishment to Hollywood in the early 1900s, the judges moved back in.

"My interest in L.A. legal history was sparked back in the mid-1970s when I first joined a law firm, Morris & Polich, headed by Landon Morris, who had been admitted to the California bar in 1932 and who regaled me with stories from the past," Wolfe said. 

Another of Wolfe's pieces for the Review concerned legal issues around the 1915 premiere of D.W. Griffith's racially charged "Birth of a Nation." 

"The L.A. City Council, at the behest of the local chapter of the NAACP, banned the showing of the film as racist," Wolfe said. "Griffith had to go to court to get an injunction against the city's police chief to proceed with the gala opening. And the film went on to break all attendance records."

Wolfe is a member of the Review's board of directors, and so is another contributor, John S. Caragozian, who also writes legal history columns for the Daily Journal. Indeed, he often expands those columns into longer Review articles.

One of them was about the demise of the Depression-era gambling ships in Santa Monica Bay following a 1939 raid supervised by California's then-Attorney General Earl Warren.

Another told of the World War II court martial convictions for mutiny of 256 Black sailors at the Port Chicago munitions facility in Contra Costa County, following a catastrophic explosion that killed 320 people.

"The California Supreme Court Historical Society Review is important not just to courts, but to lawyers and law students, too," Caragozian emailed.  

"People with an interest in history--whether judges, lawyers, students, or anyone else--benefit from the Review's stories.  The stories are accurate, short enough that busy judges and lawyers read them (and footnoted, so that readers who want to delve deeper have a starting point)."

The society launched in 1988 and 1989. A prime mover was then-State Bar President Robert S. Warren of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP, who was the society's president from 1991 to 1997. "Justice Lucas, Justice Mosk and Colin Wied [a prominent San Diego practitioner] signed the original articles of incorporation, so it had very high levels of support from the beginning," Kelso said. 

"And I just learned that Bernard Witkin was also instrumental in establishing the Society and its organizational agenda and goals," Kelso added, naming the legal scholar. "There apparently isn't anything of significance in California's legal landscape that escaped Bernie's attention!"

As for future issues of the Review, Kelso has in the works stories on race, slavery, and California law. "We weren't a slave state, but the story is not as pure as that might suggest." Beyond that, he said, "I'm going to surprise you."