When I decided I wanted to try to snag an appointment to the Court of Appeal, I polled some of my fellow Superior Court judges to find out who the competition was. Having been rejected twice for the municipal court,1 overconfidence was not my problem, and I thought I should find out if I’d set my sights impossibly high.

One of the first people I talked to was Dick Weatherspoon. Spoon had gotten the Deukmejian muni court appointment I’d coveted, and I didn’t want to go up against him with Pete Wilson in the governor’s office. His conservative credentials were orders of magnitude better than mine.