A state appeals panel has ruled the descendants of the first chief justice of the California Supreme Court can’t continue a lawsuit accusing the state of disparaging his name and reputation, breaking a contract and removing his name from a Bay Area law school, as well as stripping the family’s perpetual seat on the school’s board of directors as punishment for their ancestor’s alleged historical misdeeds.
The Hastings College Conservation Committee and six individual plaintiffs filed a lawsuit in San Francisco challenging Assembly Bill 1936. The law, which took effect Jan. 1, 2023, renamed Hastings College of the Law to College of the Law, San Francisco, and deleted from the state Education Code a requirement that one college board member “shall always be an heir or representative of S.C. Hastings.”
In addition to other judicial and political posts, Serranous Clinton Hastings led the California Supreme Court from 1849-1851 and later served two years as the state’s attorney general. According to court records, he was, by 1870, one of the state’s most prolific landowners. He founded the school in 1878 through a $100,000 payment to the public treasury and in coordination with a new state law stipulating the college would have a board of directors independent of the state regents who would be paid, by the state, $7,000 per year.
Adjusted for inflation, $100,000 from 1878 would be equal to about $3.3 million in 2025, while $7,000 would be equal to more than $226,000.
Court records trace renaming of the school to a 2017 San Francisco Chronicle report that detailed Hastings’ alleged role “in fomenting violence and atrocities” against the native inhabitants of what now is Mendocino County and his “role in the killing of indigenous people in Northern California in the mid-19th century.” Although school officials initially recommended keeping the name and pursuing “other restorative justice initiatives,” subsequent New York Times coverage in October 2021 led to board approval of a change.
The committee and Hastings descendants failed to persuade San Francisco Superior Court Judge Richard Ulner, who found the lawsuit didn’t establish the law creating the school was a contract and not the result of ordinary legislative powers. The judge also said he did not believe Assembly Bill 1936 directly punishes the plaintiffs and further found the state law doesn’t represent legislative interference in university policy, because the legislation originated from the board.
The California First District Court of Appeal agreed to hear the plaintiff’s appeal of Judge Ulner’s dismissal. Justice Jeremy Goldman wrote the panel’s opinion, filed Oct. 15; Justice Tracie Brown concurred, as did Judge Jason Clay, an Alameda Superior Court judge who sat on the panel by assignment.
Whereas Ulner reached a decision based on finding lawmakers in 1878 didn’t intend to strike a binding contract, Goldman explained the panel resolved the question of whether the state assembly even had authority to bargain away the state’s regulatory right. The plaintiffs argued the significance of Hastings’ role as a private individual, but the panel said the more pressing issue “is sovereign authority to manage a public entity,” including a school established as affiliated with the public University of California.
“The appellation of a public institution or agency, or the qualifications of individuals entitled to manage it, are matters of public significance to which future changes may be deemed important to advance the institution’s obligation to serve the public interest,” Goldman wrote. “Plaintiffs have developed no argument to the contrary. Nor have they argued by analogy to any case in which some aspect of a state’s authority to manage its own institutions or agencies was held not to be an essential attribute of sovereignty.”
Regarding the question of whether lawmakers improperly enacted a punishment, the panel explained the legal history of the concept of a “bill of attainer” and said Judge Ulner correctly dismissed the claim because traditionally such laws involved death or prison sentences, banishment or punitive property confiscation. The name change and board seat removal fall outside those categories.
Although the plaintiffs claimed Bill 1936 “marks S.C. Hastings and his descendants with a brand of infamy” because it “declares their actual or perceived wealth as stemming from the seizure of land through genocidal mass murder,” the panel noted the bill placed no blame on the Hastings family. Goldman further said that, although the law requests the college board conduct a “reading of an annual statement of the history of atrocities committed by S.C. Hastings against the Yuki people,” the complaint doesn’t challenge the provision as a bill of attainder.
When lawmakers enacted the bill, Goldman wrote, the purpose wasn’t punishing any Hastings but to address current needs of its own community and living Yuki.
“The Legislature’s findings are a reappraisal — highly critical, to be sure — of a historical public figure,” Goldman wrote. “He is not and cannot be subjected to punishment by it.”
Although the college no longer has to reserve a board seat for a Hastings relative, there is no ban on considering someone from the family for a seat. Further, “the interval of more than 130 years between the death of S.C. Hastings and the enactment of Assembly Bill 1936 renders improbably the existence of a motive to punish him. There is also nothing in the legislation to indicate that it was enacted in response to anything purportedly done or said by his descendants, including the individual plaintiffs.”
The college defendants are represented by Wilkie Farr & Gallagher and Cooley.
Attorney General Bob Bonta’s office represents the state.
Representing the plaintiffs are Michael Yamamoto, Gregory Michael, Dorothy Yamamoto and attorneys from Dhillon Law Group.
