[Congressional Record Volume 147, Number 96 (Wednesday, July 11, 2001)]
[House]
[Pages H3928-H3929]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                 REMEMBERING THE HONORABLE STANLEY MOSK

  The Speaker pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from California (Mr. Schiff) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  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.

                              {time}  1900

  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

[[Page H3929]]

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.

                          ____________________