Justice Raymond Ikola to retire from 4th District Court of Appeal

Justice Raymond J. Ikola of the 4th District Court of Appeal will retire July 1, according to a news release from the Judicial Council. The 80-year-old will step down after a 47-year legal career, including almost 26 years on the bench.

Ikola grew up in the rural Upper Peninsula of Michigan, but soon made a name for himself with academics. He earned bachelor's and master's degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Michigan, then a PhD. in electro-physics at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University.

He worked as an engineer at RCA Laboratories in Princeton, New Jersey, for several years before radically changing his profession -- and location -- in his 30s. Ikola graduated from Hastings School of Law in San Francisco in 1974. But he avoided one lucrative area of law that often attracted people with engineering backgrounds: patent law.

Instead, he became a general civil attorney and feared litigator, representing everyone from a class of wronged homeowners to a major airline. Ikola took cases as both plaintiffs' and defense counsel, but enjoyed many of his biggest wins on the plaintiff side.

He spent time with three firms in Orange County, mainly as a partner, leaving Snell & Wilmer in 1995 when Republican Gov. Pete Wilson named him to the Orange County Superior Court. He often heard complex civil and appellate division cases. In 2002, Democratic Gov. Gray Davis elevated him to the appellate court.

While he left engineering behind, he retained an analytic style on the bench. In a 2013 profile in The Daily Journal, attorneys said he never gave in to emotion. One called him a technocrat "as a compliment." Though he identifies as a political conservative, attorneys also said he developed a reputation for sticking up for criminal defendants when circumstances warranted it, including people accused serious sex crimes. In December, Ikola provided the deciding vote in a 2-1 ruling affirming that Orange County Sheriff Don Barnes must cut the jail population in half in order to comply with COVID-19 safety guidelines.

He also spent a great deal of time working in the nuts and bolts of the state legal world, serving for many years on Judicial Council panels taking on questions of technology, appellate practice and juror selection. Nearly two decades ago, he was part of a panel that attempted to make civil jury instructions easier for nonattorneys to understand. Ikola won several judge of the year awards, including from the Orange County Trial Lawyers Association and the Orange County Chapter of the American Board of Trial Advocates in 2001.