By Greg Mitchell

When justices of the Second District Court of Appeal have a question about insurance law, they go to see Walter Croskey. Croskey is a master of the field, and frequently speaks on the subject at judicial training seminars. In fact, Croskey and his Division Three are pretty well respected all around as careful, thoughtful and fair. "Justice Croskey is a unique judicial scholar," insurance litigator Paul Glad of Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal says. "Remarkably, when he has been dissatisfied with the parties' briefings, he has sought [additional] briefs from interested parties on both sides, to assure a full ventilation of the concepts at issue."

That care and precision seems to come at some cost to speed: Croskey's Division Three is the slowest to process appeals on the Second District, with a median 128 days from briefing to decision in civil appeals, 115 in criminal, according to the most recent Judicial Council statistics as of October, 1998.

Croskey seldom gets reversed or depublished -- despite producing prodigious numbers of published opinions in complex, cutting-edge cases. Indeed, he often shows the way for the Supreme Court, as he did last year in Buss v. Superior Court, 47 Cal.4th 679, which held that insurers may recover defense costs that can be allocated to clearly non-covered claims. Another key holding, In re Bridget R., requires an evidentiary hearing on the best interests of a child before it is returned from an adoptive parent to a biological parent. A Republican, former business lawyer, Croskey could be labeled conservative, but he doesn't seem ideological. He infuriated the insurance bar in 1996 when he ruled in State Farm v. Superior Court, 45 Cal.App.4th 1093, that insurers may be sued for bad faith under the Unfair Competition Law, and his ruling in Chen v. Superior Court, 54 Cal.App.4th 168, which held that a person who heard but did not see a relative's accidental death could sue for negligent infliction of emotional distress, was openly critical of a conservative Supreme Court precedent. That earned Croskey one of his rare depublications.