tanley Mosk is an institution. After 34 years on the high court, the 86-year-old Democrat is close to setting a record for the longest tenure in California history. And he shows no sign of slowing down; last year, his chambers produced some sort of opinion in almost half the cases decided by the justices, including a healthy number of majority rulings.
The court's only Democrat, Mosk has worked to broaden product liability laws, and he's been no friend to insurance companies -- though they had to be pleased with last year's Buss v. Superior Court, 16 Cal.4th 35, which gave them the right to recover some defense costs for claims with no potential for coverage. On the criminal side, Mosk is known for advancing the theory of independent state grounds for reversal when not required under the federal constitution. His People v. Wheeler, 22 Cal.3d 258, was a pioneering ruling on the discriminatory use of peremptory challenges. He is the most frequent dissenter from rulings upholding death sentences.
Mosk has always been a defender of civil liberties and wary of placing too much power in the hands of government. He cast the lone dissenting vote in 1997's People ex rel. Gallo v. Acuna, 14 Cal.4th 1090, which permits prosecutors to target gang members with civil injunctions. "No doubt Montesquieu, Locke and Madison will turn over in their graves," wrote Mosk, "when they learn they are cited in an opinion that does not enhance liberty but deprives a number of simple rights to a group of Latino youths who have not been convicted of a crime."
But Mosk is no doctrinaire liberal. His 1988 opinion in Brown v. Superior Court, 44 Cal.3d 1049, limited product liability for pharmaceutical companies, and his 1996 opinion in San Diego Gas & Electric v. Superior Court, 13 Cal.4th 893, effectively wiped out a potentially huge class of suits over electromagnetic fields. Mosk votes with the majority in the vast majority of death penalty cases. And he's a staunch opponent of affirmative action quotas, as anyone who's read his 1976 opinion in Bakke v. University of California Regents, 18 Cal.3d 34, knows well.
Nor did Mosk take the "liberal" position in last year's American Academy of Pediatrics v. Lungren, 16 Cal.4th 307. Mosk originally wrote the majority opinion upholding a 1986 law requiring minors to obtain parental or judicial consent. But when two new justices joined the court, Mosk lost his majority. Mosk has also written to protest the use of the Unruh Civil Rights Act to force a boys club to accept girls (Isbister v. Boys' Club of Santa Cruz, 40 Cal.3d 72 (1985); force a country club to accept women as members (Warfield v. Peninsula Golf & Country Club, 10 Cal.4th 594 (1995)); and force the Boy Scouts to accept gays and atheists (Randall v. Boy Scouts of America, 17 Cal.4th 736; Curran v. Boy Scouts of America, 17 Cal.4th 670.)
Although a liberal on a conservative court, Mosk still holds the respect of his colleagues. His research staff is regarded as one of the court's best; it routinely turns out scholarly yet readable opinions.
Mosk's compassion for the underdog can be traced to his life and times: A Jew raised in the primarily Scandinavian town of Rockford, Ill., he came of age in the New Deal era of the 1930s. He did his undergraduate work and two years of law school at the University of Chicago, then finished his law studies at Southwestern University in Los Angeles.
In 1939 Mosk got a job as executive secretary and legal adviser to Gov. Culbert Olson. One of Olson's last acts as governor was to appoint Mosk, at age 30, to the Los Angeles County Superior Court. He was elected California's attorney general in 1958, then appointed to the Supreme Court by Gov. Pat Brown in 1964.
