Court Opinion

ID: 9628311
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 09:16:37.651445+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:07:03.707065
License: Public Domain

NEWMAN, J., Dissenting.
The majority opinion concedes that the record here is very thin as to “brokers”. I think it is so thin that this court is not justified in negating the aims of the citizens who voted to approve the initiative measure with its broker requirements.
Regarding the initiative measure and lawyers, does not part C of the majority opinion, on equal protection, evoke memories of classical comments on law, logic, and experience? (E.g., Holmes, The Common Law (1881) p. 1; Radin, Law as Logic and Experience (1940) p. 161.) The “experience” here, I submit, at least balances the equal protection “logic.” (See A Legal Look at Congress and the State Legislatures in Legal Institutions Today and Tomorrow (Paulsen edit. 1959) at pp. 67 and 69-73 (“Legislatures and Lawyers”); cf. Fewer Lawyer-Legislators, The Recorder (Nov. 8, 1979) p. 1.)
The State Bar of California, with proclaimedly watchful but beneficent guidance from this court, over many years has constructed a labyrinth of unique rules that purport to govern the legal profession. *802Given the immense impact of that historically specialized and sometimes oligopsonistic treatment, I cannot agree with my colleagues that now we should invalidate the modest experiment that the voters have endorsed in this innovative financial-disclosure law for lawyers. (Cf. my dissents in Merco Constr. Engineers, Inc. v. Municipal Court (1978) 21 Cal.3d 724, 733 [147 Cal.Rptr. 631, 581 P.2d 636], and Fair Political Practices Com. v. Superior Court (1979) 25 Cal.3d 33, 50 [157 Cal.Rptr. 855, 599 P.2d 46].)
Bird, C. J., concurred.