Court Opinion

ID: 9580891
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-21 22:09:56.325814+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T13:36:35.070311
License: Public Domain

MOSK, J.
I concur.
There are, as plaintiffs correctly assert, no significant substantive differences between this act and the public disclosure statute enacted in 1969. Yet a majority of this court held the 1969 act unconstitutional in City of Carmel-By-The-Sea v. Young (1970) 2 Cal.3d 259 [85 Cal.Rptr. 1, 466 P.2d 225, 37 A.L.R.3d 1313], and now find this act valid because it accomplishes the same legitimate aims “in a less intrusive and considerably more limited” manner. That, I suggest, does not create a constitutional distinction between the two statutes.
As developed in my dissent in Carmel (2 Cal.3d at p. 277 et seq.), the majority in analyzing the 1969 disclosure law improperly invoked a value *678judgment on a matter of legislative policy. In scrutinizing the 1973 act, they use the same scale once again, but this time they read the weight differently.
Therefore I concur in the result reached by the majority, but for the general reasons set forth in my Carmel dissent. Had my colleagues joined me then, as they now do in effect, the people of California would not have been unnecessarily denied the legislatively declared benefits of a public disclosure law these past four years. Perhaps one should accept this fruitless delay with a certain equanimity. Inevitably another day has come, and with it application of Justice Rutledge’s quotation in Wolf v. Colorado (1949) 338 U.S. 25, 47 [93 L.Ed. 1782, 1795, 69 S.Ct. 1359]: “‘Wisdom too often never comes, and so one ought not to reject it merely because it comes late.’ ”