ABSTRACT
From the 1940s through the 1960s California’s system of justice was held up as a model for other state judiciaries. It won praise for its independence and judicial decision making. Under the guidance of forceful leadership, demonstrated by chief justices such as Donald Wright, Roger Traynor, and Phil Gibson, the California supreme court often influenced the path that the U.S. Supreme Court would follow. The California court became a national leader because it pioneered the “independentstate-grounds” doctrine to provide expanded individual rights beyond those mandated under the U.S. Constitution. Justice Stanley Mosk (an Edmund G. “Pat”
Brown appointee) argued that while the U.S. Supreme Court sets the constitutional rulings for the nation, those constitutional grounds should be regarded as the basic floor, or minimum, not the ceiling. Thus individual states are always free to provide more expanded constitutional guarantees than the more restrictive ones interpreted from the U.S. Constitution. This doctrine has, at times, encouraged the California supreme court to follow a more liberal interpretation. With the conservative turn of the California supreme court by the mid-1980s, this doctrine has fallen from favor, with the court deferring more often to the U.S. Supreme Court for judicial direction.1
