The Fall/Winter 2024 issue of the California Supreme Court Historical Society Review is now available on line. Here is Editor Molly Selvin's description of its contents.
Our lead article explores the tumultuous founding of San Quentin Prison nearly 175 years ago. As the population of the new state of California grew, driven in part by the discovery of gold in 1848, so did crime. Yet, the lack of state revenue led the Legislature to force counties to house a growing number of convicted inmates in county jails, a function for which they were largely unequipped and underfunded. Building a state prison was, as McGeorge School of Law Professor Clark Kelso wrote, an “urgent priority.” But the new state had no funds and was still getting organized. Kelso details the first decades of the iconic San Quentin Prison, and of the California Supreme Court’s key role in safeguarding the public’s interest by exercising necessary oversight of the Legislature and the governor.
Also in this issue, David Ettinger notes the centennial of the California Supreme Court’s decision in Piper v. Big Pine School District. That 1924 decision ordered the school district to admit to its school Alice Piper, a 15-year-old Native American, instead of requiring her to attend a separate “Indian School.” Ettinger, a member of the Society’s board of directors, writes that Piper “is not the best known school desegregation case in the country, or even the state.” By today’s legal standards, the ruling seems obvious, he argues, but at a time when Plessy v. Ferguson was the law of the land, “it was not easy case for Alice to win,” and was an important step toward advancing equality.
Next, we conclude the history of voting rights in California produced by a UCLA research team. Part I, in our Spring/Summer ’24 issue, explored how California systematically discriminated during its first hundred years against different groups of prospective voters, employing some of the same tools used under the Jim Crow regime of the South. Part II, in this issue, focuses on the post-World War II decades during which California law gradually made voting easier and broadened those rights, while maintaining the integrity of voting systems.
Elsewhere in this issue, UC College of the Law, San Francisco Professor and former California Supreme Court Justice Joseph R. Grodin reviews former Justice Stephen Breyer’s latest book, Reading the Constitution: Why I Chose Pragmatism, Not Textualism. We also present the three winners of the Society’s 2024 legal writing competition. And there’s more.
Finally, a personal note from Review Editor Molly Selvin: After eight years, I am retiring as the Review’s editor. It’s been a privilege to work with so many thoughtful legal historians, professors, and practitioners. We hope you’ll enjoy this issue. Beginning with the Spring/Summer ’25 publication, the Review will rest in the capable hands of Professor Clark Kelso. As always, we welcome your comments and your article ideas. Please write to ckelso@pacific.edu.
We want to record our appreciation of Molly Selvin, for taking on what we imagine was the sometimes challenging job, common to court-based historical societies, of bridging between professors, lawyers, judges, and the public and for her earlier study (with Patricia Ebener) of civil litigation in the Los Angeles Superior Court, which was a major contribution to the genre of caseload studies and therefore to our understanding the history of the American judiciary.
--Dan Ernst
