Description
McFarland & Company, Published 2013. Paperback, vii + 280 pp.; 26 cm; illustrated with black-and-white photographs.
Rare, out-of-print & unusual books · Since 1997
110
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Catalog notes
Condition & notes
In Very Good condition. Glossy pictorial covers, mild shelf and edge wear with light bumping to the edges and creasing to the corner tips. Binding tight. Pages clean and unmarked. The first biography of Stanley Mosk (1912-2001), the longest-serving justice in the history of the California Supreme Court, on the bench from 1964 until his death in 2001. Braitman, formerly of the UCLA history department and assistant executive director of the California Supreme Court Historical Society, and Uelmen, professor and former dean at Santa Clara Law, follow Mosk from Rockford, Illinois to Los Angeles, through his years as executive secretary to Governor Culbert Olson, sixteen years on the superior court, and his 1958 election as attorney general, where a Senate seat looked all but certain until Pat Brown's appointment to the high court took him off that road for good. On the Court he built the "Mosk Doctrine," the argument that state constitutions rather than the federal one should be the primary ground of state supreme court decisions, insulating them from review by an increasingly conservative federal bench; he opposed racial quotas and took the resulting abuse from his own allies; and he survived the 1986 retention purge that swept Rose Bird, Cruz Reynoso and Joseph Grodin off the bench. Drawn on family papers and Mosk's own files, and illustrated with photographs from the family collection, including Mosk with the Kennedy brothers, with Sinatra, Dean Martin and Sandy Koufax, and with the Lucas court of 1991. With chapter notes, bibliography, an index of cases, and a general index.