Richard's examples certainly illustrate the point about favoritism.  All my prejudices are for Wilson Riles and against the Green Party, but law is not about prejudices.  Favoritism is.
 
 
          Best,
 
          Daniel Lowenstein
          UCLA Law School
          405 Hilgard
          Los Angeles, California 90095-1476
          310-825-5148

________________________________

From: ban@richardwinger.com [mailto:richardwinger@yahoo.com]
Sent: Sat 8/13/2005 9:54 AM
To: Lowenstein, Daniel; election-law@majordomo.lls.edu
Subject: past Calif. Supreme Court decisions that were never explained



I remember the California Supreme Court's decision in
1978, Riles v Eu.  The incumbent Superintendent of
Public Instruction, Wilson Riles, somehow failed to
collect 65 valid signatures on his petition to get on
the ballot.  The California Supreme Court put him on
the ballot anyway, on March 28, 1978.  But the Court
didn't produce a published record of what it had done.
 The order is only one paragraph long.  The key
sentence is, "Although respondent (March Fong Eu)
discharged her ministerial duties in compliance with
the applicable provisions of the Elections Code, from
our review of the documents filed we conclude that
petitioner has substantially complied with these
provisions."

When Terry Baum was kept off the November 2004 ballot
as the Green Party nominee for Congress from San
Francisco, because not all of her write-ins in the
Green Party primary were considered valid (so that she
fell just short of the legally required number to be
nominated), and she sued in state court to get all of
her write-ins acknowledged as valid, her attorney
tried to cite Riles v Eu.  But with no published
record, and the opposition attorney's initial reaction
that no such case had ever existed, Riles v Eu proved
useless.

Still another order of the California Supreme Court to
put someone on the ballot also didn't get any opinion,
published or not.  That was the court's order on March
23, 1964, to put Pierre Salinger on the Democratic
primary ballot for U.S. Senate.  He was registered to
vote in Virginia at the time.  He was unable to
register in California because at the time, no one
could register in California unless he or she had
lived a year in the state.  The case was Salinger v
Rogers.  The issue was whether the federal
constitution forbids the state from setting residency
requirements for candidates for congress.  The
California Supreme Court ordered Salinger put on the
ballot, but didn't write any explanation of its
reasoning (not even a sentence) and of course there is
no published record of the order.

--- "Lowenstein, Daniel" <lowenstein@law.ucla.edu>
wrote:

         My understanding (which in this instance is
guided by Fred Woocher, making it considerably more
reliable than my understanding would be unassisted)
is that the Court of Appeal's extremely careful and
well-reasoned opinion will be liquidated by virtue
of the Supreme Court's order, but that the Supreme
Court's order will not be published.  In one sense,
that means there will be no "precedent" established
by this decision, so destructive of certainty and
therefore supportive of favoritism in election law.

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