Barely three months after Senate Republicans denounced Goodwin Liu as a left-wing extremist and torpedoed his nomination to a federal appeals court, he was lauded as a brilliant and open-minded legal scholar Wednesday and confirmed to a seat on the California Supreme Court.
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The new Brown appoints the new Rose Bird.
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Rose Bird, Once California’s Chief Justice, Is Dead at 63
By TODD S. PURDUM
Published: December 06, 1999
Rose E. Bird, who became the first woman on California’s Supreme Court and whose resolute opposition to the death penalty later led voters to remove her as chief justice, died of complications from breast cancer on Saturday at a hospital near her home in Palo Alto, Calif. She was 63.
Almost from the moment she was appointed to head the state’s highest court by Gov. Jerry Brown in 1977, Ms. Bird, a pioneering liberal lawyer who had never been a judge, became one of the most controversial figures in California politics. She led a liberal majority that strengthened environmental laws and consumer rights. But in 1986, voters angry at her opposition to the death penalty removed her and two other Brown-appointed justices by refusing to extend their terms. They were the first such removals in California history.
Ms. Bird, who came of professional age at a time when major law firms still resisted hiring women, held a succession of path-breaking jobs. She was the first woman hired by the Santa Clara County public defender’s office in Northern California, and she became the first woman to hold a cabinet-level post in state government when Mr. Brown named her his secretary of agriculture in 1975. Many of her detractors were forced to acknowledge her administrative skills, while even her admirers among judges and lawyers conceded the brittleness that made her a lighting rod for criticism.
