CALIF. SUPREME COURT TACKLES SSM: From the San Francisco Chronicle

When the California Supreme Court looks at the legality of same-sex marriages in San Francisco on Tuesday, it will be led by its most politically adroit chief justice in decades.

Since being promoted to the top spot in 1996 by Gov. Pete Wilson, who had named him to the court five years earlier, Ronald George has cultivated three governors, the Legislature, the news media and the public while tiptoeing with his colleagues through the minefields of abortion, civil rights, prisoner releases and the gubernatorial recall.

George does not lack courage: He faced down a political challenge over an abortion case soon after taking office and took on a popular district attorney in a serial murder case as a trial judge. He is prodigiously hard-working after 32 years on the bench. He is affable, unpretentious and accessible; reporters who ask the court for information are often surprised to get a call back from the chief justice himself.

He is also quite cautious, by philosophy and disposition, and, for the most part, so is his court.

It is the most diverse Supreme Court, by ethnicity and gender, in California history, and more diverse ideologically than its 6-1 Republican majority would suggest. Its rulings are usually clear and thorough, although they are not always predictable. But it is not a court of risk-takers or trailblazers, which may be what advocates of same-sex marriage need.

"I don't think you're going to see this court go out on a proactive limb, like the Massachusetts court," which legalized same-sex marriages, said Santa Clara University law Professor Gerald Uelmen, a longtime analyst of the California court who generally admires George. ...

You don't please so many powerful people by ruffling too many feathers. George and his court, to a great extent, habitually act with deference to the political branches of government and often try to defuse controversies they can't avoid.

The state's high court stayed out of last year's recall election and also sidestepped both the continuing controversy over "three-strikes" sentences for minor crimes and the uproar this year over Death Row inmate Kevin Cooper's claim of innocence, leaving the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to play its customary role of lightning rod in each case.

The state court, with George at the helm, intervened in two other high- profile cases, but did so in a way that mollified then-Gov. Gray Davis and a fearful public -- blocking a convicted murderer's parole and a sex offender's release from a mental hospital. The subsequent rulings gave the governor broad, though not unlimited, authority over such releases.

The court seems to be acting with similar caution in the same-sex marriage case. The justices waited for a request from the state attorney general before halting San Francisco's City Hall weddings last month. Then they focused on a narrow question: whether Mayor Gavin Newsom exceeded his authority by issuing marriage licenses in defiance of state law.

The larger, more incendiary issue in the case -- whether California's one-man, one-woman marriage law violates the right of gays and lesbians to equality under the law -- was shuttled off to lower courts. If normal timetables are followed, this matter won't be back before the state's high court for a year or two, when the climate may be different.

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posted by Eve at 10:18 PM | link

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