Siegel v. Committee of Bar Examiners

• Decision Date: 09 October 1973
• Docket Number: S.F. 22957
• Citation: 110 Cal.Rptr. 15,514 P.2d 967,10 Cal.3d 156
• Court: California Supreme Court
• Parties: , 514 P.2d 967 Daniel Mark SIEGEL, Petitioner, v. COMMITTEE OF BAR EXAMINERS, the STATE BAR OF CALIFORNIA, Respondent.

Page 15

110 Cal.Rptr. 15

10 Cal.3d 156, 514 P.2d 967

Daniel Mark SIEGEL, Petitioner, v. COMMITTEE OF BAR EXAMINERS, the STATE BAR OF CALIFORNIA, Respondent.

S.F. 22957.

Supreme Court of California,

In Bank.

Oct. 9, 1973.

Marshall W. Krause, Forest Knolls, Treuhaft, Walker & Bernstein, Malcolm Burnstein, Oakland, Garry, Dreyfus, McTernan & Brotsky, Francis J. McTernan, San Francisco, Barry Winograd, Oakland, and Doron Weinberg, San Francisco, for petitioner.

Charles C. Marson and Peter E. Sheehan, San Francisco, as amici curiae for petitioner.

Kenneth D. McCloskey and Samuel L. Holmes, San Francisco, for respondent.

BY THE COURT.

Daniel Mark Siegel seeks review of the action of the Committee of Bar Examiners of the State Bar in refusing to certify him to this court for admission and a license to practice law in California. (Bus. & Prof. Code, § 6066; Cal.Rules of Court, rule 59.)

Petitioner graduated from the School of Law of the University of California at Berkeley in 1970. He took and passed the bar examination given general applicants in August 1970. However, he was not certified to this court for admission because respondent Committee of Bar Examiners of the State Bar (Committee) was not satisfied that he was of the 'good moral character' requisite for certification. (Bus. & Prof.Code, § 6060, subd. (c); Rules Regulating Admission to Practice Law, rule II, § 22, rule X, § 101.)

Respondent Committee caused a threemember subcommittee to be established in order to make an investigation into petitioner's moral character. Hearings were conducted by the subcommittee on five different dates, commencing May 19, 1971. Petitioner was present with counsel at these hearings, and the sworn testimony of 11 witnesses, including petitioner, was taken by the subcommittee. Some six months after the conclusion of these hearings the subcommittee issued its report, findings, conclusions and recommendations in which it was concluded that petitioner was not a person of good moral character within the meaning of section 6060, subdivision (b) of the Business and Professions Code and recommended that petitioner not be certified to this court for admission to practice.

On May 20, 1972, respondent Committee at petitioner's request convened a hearing at which petitioner appeared with counsel and answered questions put by the Committee members. No other evidence was taken at this time and the matter was submitted at the conclusion of the haring.

On June 28, 1972, respondent Committee issued its findings of fact, conclusions of law, and decision which, by a vote of five to two, concluded that petitioner '(was) not possessed of good moral character in that he does not possess the requisite qualities of honesty, fairness, candor and truthfulness which are an essential part of fitness to practice law and requisite for this Committee's certification.' ¹ This conclusion and the consequent denial of certification were based upon a factual finding that petitioner had lied under oath to the subcommittee and to the Committee at the hearings before them with regard to the meaning and intended effect of certain utterances made by him in the course of three speeches delivered in 1969 and 1970. ²

In accordance with our duty to undertake an independent examination of the evidence in cases of this kind (see Hallinan v. Committee of Bar Examiners (1966) 65 Cal.2d 447, 450--451, 55 Cal.Rptr. 228, 421 P.2d 76, and cases there cited; March v. Committee of Bar Examiners (1967) 67 Cal.2d 718, 720, 63 Cal.Rptr. 399, 433 P.2d 191; Bernstein v. Committee of Bar Examiners (1968) 69 Cal.2d 90, 97, 70 Cal.Rptr. 106, 443 P.2d 570), we proceed to a consideration of the record.

I The Applicant's Prima Facie Case

'Under the Rules Regulating Admission to Practice Law the burden of proving good moral character is upon the applicant. (Rule X, § 101; see also In re Garland, 219 Cal. 661, 662, 28 P.2d 354; Spears v. State Bar, 211 Cal. 183, 188, 294 P. 697, 72 A.L.R. 923.) Pursuant to this rule the applicant must initially furnish enough evidence of good moral character to establish a prima facie case, and the committee then has the opportunity to rebut that showing with evidence of bad character. (Konigsberg v. State Bar of California, 366 U.S. 36, 41, 81 S.Ct. 997, 6 L.Ed.2d 105.)' (Hallinan v. Committee of Bar Examiners, Supra, 65 Cal.2d 447, 449--450, fn. 1, 55 Cal.Rptr. 228, 231, 421 P.2d 76, 79.) In the instant case petitioner presented to the subcommittee and the Committee ample evidence to establish a prima facie showing of good moral character. Because this evidence (all of which is uncontradicted) is relevant to our overall determination ³ we set forth a summary of it below.

(1) Scholarly Achievements. Petitioner attended high school in New York, graduating second in his class. He was elected to the National Honor Society and received several scholarships, among them a New York State Regents Scholarship and a scholarship from Hamilton College in New York, which he subsequently attended. Petitioner graduated Magna cum laude from Hamilton, with a grade average of approximately 95, and was awarded department honors from the department of religion. He was offered law school scholarships at the University of Chicago and the University of California (Boalt Hall) and chose the latter. Following graduation he passed the bar examination and was awarded a Reginald Heber Smith Community Law Fellowship for work with the Legal Aid Society of Alameda County.

(2) Civic Activities. Prior to graduation from high school petitioner was active in the Boy Scouts of America, attaining the rank of Life Scout and serving as a junior assistant scout master. During the summer of his sophomore year in college he worked as a volunteer in a YWCA-sponsored project in Raleigh, North Carolina, involved in voter registration and a survey of social needs in the black community there. Later the same summer he worked as a paid counselor in a home for delinquent teenagers sponsored by the Lutheran Church in Utica, New York. The following year he entered a competition sponsored by the Wall Street Journal Newspaper Fund for students interested in journalistic activities, and he was one of 50 persons nationally to win a fellowship. He was placed with a newspaper in Quincy, Massachusetts, and he worked there that summer and the summer following, the latter term as a full-time staff reporter assigned to cover local political and civic affairs. In the course of this work he wrote a feature story on a program designed to train young people to be of assistance to the blind, and for this story he received a commendatory letter from the Massachusetts Association for the Blind. The same summer--that of 1967--petitioner helped organize a drive in the Boston area to collect food, clothing, and money for the relief of victims of the massive civil disorders in Detroit. At the conclusion of the summer petitioner was made an honorary citizen of Quincy by mayoral proclamation. With his entry into law school, petitioner began to undertake activities which, while broadly speaking might be classified 'civic,' were more specifically of a legal or political nature. These will therefore be discussed below. It seems appropriate, however, to mention at this point that in the spring of 1969 petitioner was elected to the presidency of the Associated Students of the University of California at Berkeley.

(3) Legal Activities. Soon after entering law school petitioner became active in the Boalt Hall Community Assistance Program, an organization within the school which sponsored various projects involving student participation in the legal process--projects ranging from student assistance for attorneys engaged in certain aspects of poverty and criminal law to the development of an 'own recognizance' release program in the Oakland-Berkeley area. In the spring of his first year petitioner became the director of this organization and was instrumental in the development of a project in which law students and medical students were sent to assist lawyers and doctors involved in community service projects in the San Joaquin Valley. During the same period he was head of the Boalt Hall chapter of the Law Students Civil Rights Research Council, a national organization of some 70 chapters whose function is to recruit law students to assist attorneys and organizations in civil rights and poverty-related work around the country. The following school year petitioner participated in a weekend colloquium organized by the faculty of the law school and the California Law Review pertaining to revisions in the legal curriculum, and in that connection he and two other students prepared and presented a proposal that the first-year program include more intensive courses in the philosophy and sociology of law in addition to the traditional subjects and that the second and third year include 'apprenticeship' or practical training in the field of particular interest. During that year petitioner was also elected to the position of Student Advocate of the Associated Students, the function of which is to provide counsel for students involved in university disciplinary proceedings and he represented many such students in that capacity. ⁴ The following summer he was himself awarded a fellowship by the Law Students Civil Rights Research Council and assigned to work with attorneys in two bay area law offices. After graduation in 1970, as already noted above, petitioner was awarded a Reginald Heber Smith Community Law Fellowship to work with the Legal Aid Society of Alameda County, and he remained in that position for one year. ⁵

(4) Political Activities. Although it might be said that petitioner has been engaged in political activity for a considerable portion of his life, he became most visibly so engaged following the spring of 1969, when he served as Student Advocate and was elected to the presidency of the Associated...