Letters to the Editor

By George!
      Regrettably, from the sound of matters, meaningless statistics mean everything to Professor Gerald Uelmen in his article on the George Court ["Meeting in the Middle," July]. Indeed, whereas dissent is implicitly deemed bad, and conversely, unanimity is good, we are left believing that truly pedestrian judicial performance by our chief justice is somehow to be glorified. After all, "Twenty years after Californians purged the state Supreme Court of three of its justices, there is little public dissatisfaction with judicial performance at any level--and electoral challenges to sitting judges are actually declining." Great, we're all safe now!
      Does the good professor suggest that the above means we have a vigorous and intellectually superior judiciary? I don't think we do. Indeed, I don't see how anyone can get excited about boorish, right-wing judicial mediocrity, particularly when we are speaking of the chief justice of California. Thus, the problem--from my vantage point anyway--is that there has been no meeting in the middle; rather, there has been a "hard right rudder" command from King George, even though, according to our good professor, the chief justice "has skillfully eschewed ideological labeling." Recent cases all point to a rather serious erosion of our fundamental constitutional rights by none other than our current right-wing judiciary, a judiciary that, evidently, has never seen a police detention it didn't like.
      In conclusion, rather than praise King George for his mindless mediocre meanderings, I suggest it is time to fire up the recall petition and send this loony chief justice back to the funny farm.
      Bill Mayo
      Chico
     
      Gerald F. Uelmen responds:
      Mr. Mayo's rant seems misdirected. While recent California Supreme Court cases certainly nibble away some Fourth Amendment protection, the "hard right" is coming from the U.S. Supreme Court (e.g., Hudson v. Michigan (2006), eliminating the exclusionary rule for knock-and-announce violations). Unfor- tunately, we in California are captives of the U.S. Supreme Court majority when it comes to exclusionary rules; Proposition Eight (Cal. Const., art. I, sec. 28) gives our supreme court no choice but to follow U.S. Supreme Court precedent, with no room for broader protection under our state constitution.
     
      Token of Disaffection
      As an East Indian woman in the legal field, I can't tell you how often I have felt the feelings reflected in Linda Mabry's article [In Pro Per, "The Token," July]. While I feel blessed to have already had a very successful career in firms and in corporate life, I often have felt the challenges she describes.
      I have often wondered if I were the only one who felt the way Mabry did, and it's nice to know I am not.
      Rinky S. Parwani
      Frisco, Texas
     
      I commend Linda Mabry for her honest account of being a "token" in her law firm. While attending UC Davis School of Law in the 1990s, I clerked at two top law firms and had similar experiences to those she described so eloquently. At one firm, the main partner did a skit in blackface! Yes, I am African American. Weeks later, I sat in an upscale restaurant in San Francisco with some of the partners and associates and our shipping- line clients. I had to endure a racist joke that was told for my benefit. I was the only person of color and the only woman at the table.
      The following summer I clerked at a firm with another black woman law clerk who happened to be a good friend of mine. As we didn't want to appear to be lazy or too social with one another, we never sat on the receptionist's desk or strolled the hallways as the white male summer clerks did most of the day. At the end of the summer only one of us received a job offer. A "token" black female associate later told me that the firm's perception was that we had disliked one another and couldn't work together because we didn't gab it up and laugh in the hallways. I discovered that we are often damned if we do, and damned if we don't. At that point, I decided to dedicate my legal career to serving low-income and underrepresented people.
      Chancela Al-Mansour
      Directing attorney of Pro Bono Project/Law Clerk Recruitment Neighborhood Legal Services of L.A. County
      Pacoima
     
      Linda Mabry's article in California Lawyer was very moving. In retrospect, I guess I was lucky. I started practicing law at O'Melveny in 1971, when there were already two women lawyers there. I was never the only one.
      By the time I joined a more mainstream firm, there were women moving in-house, and I figured that I had a real competitive advantage by being a woman lawyer.
      It sounds like Mabry ended up much more isolated than I did. I was also lucky in law school. I started in 1968, when the University of Chicago Law School had its first-ever class with 20 percent women. We faced a lot of overt discrimination from law firms in those days, but we did it in a large pack.
      Karen Kaplowitz
      Princeton, New Jersey
     
      Letters on Letters
      In the letters section of your July issue, two Rocketdyne/AI ex-employees appeared to excuse the actions of those companies at their Santa Susana plant in the past, because there was no Occupational Safety Agency.
      They're wrong. There were such agencies, but they failed to do their job, in spite of notification of the cancer risk. I know, because I'm at least one who told them.
      In the late 1970s I was in the practice of radiation oncology in the San Fernando Valley, with offices in Van Nuys, Northridge, and West Hills. I noticed an unusual number of cancer cases in relatively young people who worked at that facility. When I asked them if they worked with radiation or carcinogenic chemicals, they usually said they couldn't say, as their work was classified. Some said, "I don't work in that section."
      To calculate the excess risk, I asked Rockwell International how many employees they had. They wouldn't tell me. Using the best estimates I could get, I calculated the age-adjusted cancer risk to be about 80 times normal.
      I wrote letters to the Los Angeles Department of Radiation Health and the California Department of Health Services, outlining my findings. I also spoke directly to the radiation health examiner for the county.
      Nothing was ever done. As with the A-bomb tests in Nevada, the Cold Warriors apparently felt that the deaths of a few unsuspecting civilians was a small price to pay for victory. But make no mistake--this was not ignorance or negligence. These were conscious, intentional acts.
      Harvey S. Frey
      Santa Monica
     
      California Lawyer welcomes letters to the editor and publishes excerpts from as many as possible. Please include your phone number and city of residence. Write to us at 44 Montgomery St., Suite 250, San Francisco, CA 94104, fax 415/296-2482, or email letters_callaw@dailyjournal.com.
     

---