M. C. Sloss and the California Supreme Court

Abstract

Early in the year 1906, Governor George C. Pardee offered Marcus C. Sloss the post on the California Supreme Court vacated by the death the preceding Christmas Day of Associate Justice Walter Van Dyke. Max Sloss, as he was commonly known, was a young San Franciscan who had just completed five years of a six-year term as Superior Judge to which he had been elected in 1900. The appointment was more than unsolicited; it was so unexpected that when Judge Sloss received the telephone call from the Governor, he half-suspected a bit of playful banter on the part of a relative addicted to such pranks, and was saved only by a combination of innate caution and good luck from responding in that vein. When Justice Sloss took his seat on the supreme court on February 1, 1906, he was not yet 37 years old. In November, 1906, he was elected for the unexpired balance of Van Dyke's term, and in November, 1910, he was re-elected for the ensuing full twelve-year term. On February 28, 1919, his fiftieth birthday, he resigned to resume the practice of law. His period of service was just over thirteen years-from shortly before the San Francisco earthquake and fire to shortly after the end of World War I. For lawyers accustomed to browsing in the California Reports, the period can be identified as running from Volume 148 to Volume 180. This paper, written only a few months after Judge Sloss's death, was prepared in response to a request for information on his contributions to the development of California law while on the bench. It is therefore inevitably an exercise in legal history. To be appreciated, the matters to be discussed must be seen in that perspective. The activities of the California Supreme Court, moreover, are inevitably a part of the history of California as a whole, no matter how much judicial detachment the justices may pursue or achieve. And California's history from 1906 to 1919 was turbulent and colorful. In the earlier volumes, we are repeatedly made aware of how profoundly San Francisco, then the unchallenged metropolis of the state, had been shaken, both physically by the catastrophe of 1906 and spiritually by the graft scandals culminating in the removal of Mayor Schmitz on his conviction for extortion and the imprisonment of the political boss, Abe Ruef.' We sense, too, the beginnings of the explosive growth of Los