Mr. SCHIFF. Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my colleagues for their kind remarks.
Mr. Speaker, I rise today to pay my deepest respects to the memory and legacy of California State Supreme Court Justice Stanley Mosk, a long-standing champion of civil rights and free speech, who passed away in his home on June 19, 2001, at the age of 88. Justice Mosk loved serving on the court and had very reluctantly decided to retire due to his advancing age. Sadly, Justice Mosk died on the day he was to submit his resignation to the Governor of California.
I first learned of Justice Mosk as a law student in the 1980s when I studied his opinions as required reading at Harvard Law School, along with the opinions of Justices Tobriner and Traynor. Traynor, Tobriner and Mosk were the giants of the California courts. They were the three gentlemen who made the California court, in many people's view, many scholars around the country, truly the highest court in the land.
Justice Mosk served 37 years on that court, the longest of any justice, and served with remarkable productivity, authoring 1,688 rulings. Smart, eloquent and principled, he had a magnificent record of upholding and expanding the rights of individuals.
Born on September 4, 1912, in San Antonio, Texas, Stanley Mosk was educated in public schools in Rockford, Illinois, and attended the University of Chicago Law School, earning his J.D. from Southwestern University in Los Angeles.
He was elected to serve as California attorney general in 1959 after campaigning in which he overcame tactics making his religious faith as a Jew an issue, and won by more than a 1-million-vote margin over his opponent, the largest majority in any contest in America that year. He was overwhelmingly reelected in 1962.
As attorney general for nearly 6 years, he issued approximately 2,000 written opinions, appeared before the U.S. Supreme Court in the Arizona v. California water case, and other landmark matters. He served on numerous boards and commissions, handled antitrust matters, constitutional rights, consumer fraud, investigative fraud, authoring some of California's most constructive legislative proposals in the field of crime and law enforcement.
He established the Attorney General's Civil Rights Division and fought to force the Professional Golfers Association to amend its bylaws denying access to minority golfers.
Governor Pat Brown appointed Mosk to the California Supreme Court in 1964. I note with pride that the late Senator Sam Ervin of North Carolina, on the floor of Congress on August 5, 1964, referred to Mosk as "one of the finest constitutional lawyers in the United States.'' While on the court, Justice Mosk authored decisions that presaged decisions later reached by the U.S. Supreme Court. Mosk, as a superior court judge in 1947, overturned a restrictive covenant that had prevented African Americans and other minorities from moving into particular neighborhoods a year before the United States Supreme Court voided such covenants. He wrote a 1978 decision barring prosecutors from using preemptory challenges to eliminate minority or female jurors in criminal cases, a trailblazing ruling that later became Federal constitutional law when the U.S. Supreme Court reached the same conclusion 8 years later.
Mosk, as commentators have noted, was consistent in upholding the rights of individuals. He detested quotas and led the court majority in striking down admission formulas used by the medical school at the University of California at Davis. "Originated as a means of exclusion of racial and religious minorities, a quota becomes no less offensive when it serves to exclude a racial majority,'' he wrote. Personally opposed to the death penalty, Mosk nonetheless upheld the law in capital cases.
As the Sacramento Bee columnist Peter Schrag has eloquently noted, Justice Mosk exhibited a "combination of judicial creativity and practical sense that produced a string of imaginative legal departures.'' Among those imaginative legal departures, as Schrag notes, are decisions that handicapped parents could not be stereotyped and automatically ruled unfit to raise their children; that victims of a pharmaceutical drug who could not identify the specific maker of the pharmaceutical product they consumed could collect damages from all manufacturers in proportion to their market share when injured; and upholding State law requiring private owners of tidelands to permit public access.
As the Sacramento Bee recently editorialized, "Mosk's greatest contribution to the law and rights was pioneering the theory of `independent state grounds.' The rights of the people were lodged not just in the Bill of Rights and transitory interpretations of the Supreme Court majority,'' Mosk argued. "They were embedded as well in State Constitutions, which sometimes offered greater protection to individuals than the minimum required by the Federal courts. The doctrine, widely adopted by State courts around the country, is the source of many path-breaking privacy rulings and has given States the chance to become agents for legal change.''
Justice Mosk is survived by his wife, Kaygey Kash Mosk; his son, Richard; and his grandson, Matthew Mosk, is in attendance in the House gallery here tonight. To them, I want to extend my sincere condolences and, as the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Pelosi) indicated, all of our sincere pride in the work of that great man. As the Sacramento Bee editorialized so appropriately, Justice Mosk was "California's brightest beacon of liberty.'' While his life has ended, his legacy shines brightly for all Californians and for our great Nation.