April 29, 2001
The San Francisco Chronicle
Newsmaker ProfileOn first take, it's hard to believe that Janice Rogers Brown '77, the daughter of Alabama sharecroppers and the first African American woman on the California Supreme Court, would write a decision jeopardizing hundreds of affirmative action programs throughout the state.
After four years as a justice, Brown has staked a claim for herself as the outspoken conservative on a court steering a moderate course. Her opinions are pointed and provocative, and she doesn't mind taking swipes at her colleagues.
Brown is best known for her November decision upholding Proposition 209, the 1996 voter-approved initiative barring preferential treatment for women and minorities. In writing the majority opinion, Brown attacked the entire history of affirmative action, a move that Chief Justice Ronald George, in a rare dissent, condemned as being "unnecessary and inappropriate."
Ward Connerly, one of the prime backers in the 1996 initiative, is a big fan of Brown's. He says she has "a profound respect for civil rights," but also believes in individual responsibility. Although she is a prominent minority woman, he said, "she doesn't carry on her shoulders the burdens of anybody else or the expectations of anybody else."
A liberal in her college days, the 51-year-old justice became a conservative after law school convinced her that the courts should be not be used for sweeping social changes. She is a quiet, intensely private person--Brown refused repeated requests to be interviewed for this story and others. In court, she asks few questions when lawyers argue their cases. But when she writes an opinion, she becomes a pugnacious street fighter on legal-size paper.
Brown sprinkles her decisions with quotes and characters from Plato's "Republic," George Washington's farewell address, John Grisham novels and songwriter Billy Preston's 1970s song "Nothing From Nothing Leaves Nothing."
Her defenders say that Brown is motivated by a sense of justice, not by any preconceived notions or political beliefs. Her passions and forthright opinions came through in the majority opinion she wrote in the Proposition 209 case. With the court deeply divided, Brown wrote a majority opinion that stung liberals and minorities because of her condemnation of several key civil rights rulings.
Brown was born in Greenville, Ala., about 50 miles south of Montgomery. As a child growing up in the segregated South, she was surrounded by color barriers in schools, restaurants and hospitals. After graduating from UCLA law school, Brown spent eight years at the state attorney general's office working on both civil and criminal cases. In 1991, she became Wilson's legal affairs secretary, advising him on such issues as term limits, executions and reapportionment. Wilson appointed her to the state Court of Appeal in October 1994. In May 1996, she was confirmed to the state Supreme Court.
Justice Brown--in her own words--Justice Janice Rogers Brown may ask few questions in court, but she holds little back in written opinions. Brown has a broad sense of history, an undeniable literary flair and a tendency to fling a few zingers. While all of her decisions can be lively, she saves most of her rhetorical punches for dissenting opinions. Here is a sampling--In a 1997 decision that allowed cities to clear the streets of gang members who annoy or intimidate residents, she wrote: "Liberty unrestrained is an invitation to anarchy"--She backed drug testing for both job applicants and current employees up for promotion in government, calling it one of the trade-offs of being a public employee. "Such choices are neither easy nor comfortable," she wrote. "But that is life. Sometimes beauty is fierce; love is tough; and freedom is painful"--When the court ruled that the governor and Legislature could appoint members of the State Bar Court, a power that previously belonged solely to the state Supreme Court, Brown took a jab at colleagues in her dissenting opinion: "The preservation of a viable constitutional government is not a task for wimps"--She was also aghast when the majority allowed a judge to ban racial slurs in the workplace, saying they had frivolously brushed away free speech rights. "I can conceive no imprisonment so complete, no subjugation so absolute, no debasement so abject as the enslavement of the mind"--In a relatively obscure antitrust case, she offered this reminder to her senior colleagues: "The quixotic desire to do good, be universally fair and make everybody happy is understandable. Indeed, the majority's zeal is more than a little endearing. There is only one problem with this approach. We are a court."