Phil Gibson--A Remembrance

Abstract

Finance Director and I served as Executive Secretary to the Governor. Through our work, and our respective admiration for the lofty and uncompromising ideals of Governor Olson, we became personal friends as well as associates. Indeed at one time he invited me to accept appointment as Assistant Finance Director-which would have meant in those days a munificent increase in salary from my $5,000 per year to $7,500. I declined the offer because I found the legal work in the Governor's office to be challenging and I never was proficient in finance and math. Perhaps if they had computers in those days . We took slightly different professional paths-he directly to the appellate scene, I to a trial court and to the office of Attorney General-before going on to the supreme court, but our close friendship continued. In our salad days, after some staid bar association functions, we closed many a North Beach bar while happily musing about law, politics, and life generally. Theodore Roosevelt could have had a Phil Gibson in mind when he once wrote that lawyers are more fun to work with, fight with, and play with than anyone else. For every one of these succeeding forty-five years my respect and admiration for Phil Gibson as a sensitive human being, public servant, and scholar in the law has grown. These feelings not only remain undiminished now that he has been taken from our midst, but will be enhanced by the perspective of history. After submitting and obtaining passage of the first Olson budget by a hostile legislature in 1939, Gibson was appointed to the supreme court as an associate justice in August of that year. Ten months later he succeeded Chief Justice Waste, who died in June 1940. As Chief Justice, Gibson is properly credited with bringing the archaic administrative system of justice in California into the twentieth century. The chaotic and overlapping jurisdictions of police courts, city courts, justice courts, and municipal courts were eliminated and our present two-tier trial court system was firmly established, over the vehement objections of entrenched incumbents and powerful local political interests. Regardless of their influence they were no match for