Some of the greatest lawyers and public servants this country has ever known studied law in California accredited law schools (CALS). Marvin Lewis, Sr., a famed San Francisco Trial Lawyer; former California Governor Edmund G. (Pat) Brown, Sr.; and former Lieutenant-Governor Leo T. McCarthy, were graduates of a small evening California accredited law school in San Francisco.
Graduates of the California accredited law schools also include Jose Alva, the first Latino Superior Court Judge in San Joaquin County, California; Bonnie Dumanis, the first openly lesbian/LGBT community member to serve as a district attorney in the nation, and first woman and first Jewish person elected as district attorney for San Diego County, California; Jan Scully, the first woman district attorney of Sacramento County, California; Barbara S. Fass, the first female Mayor of Stockton, California; Lewis F. Brown, Sr., the first African American elected to office in Solano County, California; Civil Rights Activist Oscar “Zeta” Acosta Fierro; and numerous other judges, district attorneys, city attorneys, and other distinguished politicians, lawyers and leaders.
Names and information for some of the graduates appear below.
Edmund Gerald “Pat” Brown, Sr. studied law at San Francisco Law School, where he graduated first in his class. While in law school, Brown worked for Milton Schmitt, a blind attorney and former Republican assemblyman. Brown continued to work for Schmitt after passing the bar at the age of 21 and eventually took over the practice.
On January 8, 1944, Brown was sworn into office as San Francisco’s District Attorney, a post he held until 1950 when he became the state’s Attorney General. He served two terms as California’s Attorney General, initiating statistical crime review and establishing the Citizens’ Advisory Committee on Crime Prevention during his tenure.
In 1959, Brown became the 32nd Governor of California, and four years later, defeated Richard Nixon to serve a second term. While in office, Brown significantly expanded California’s university system, made massive investments in the state’s freeway and water systems, and established California’s first commission to guarantee equal employment opportunities.
Leo Tarcisius McCarthy was an American lawyer, businessman and politician. He served as the 43rd Lieutenant Governor of California. His parents emigrated in the early 1900s from County Kerry in Ireland to Auckland, New Zealand in search of a better life. In the midst of the Great Depression, when Leo was three years old, he, his parents and siblings, immigrated to the United States. They settled in San Francisco where his father became the proprietor of an Irish tavern. Leo went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in history from the University of San Francisco (USF) and then served in the U.S. Air Force Strategic Air Command during the Korean War.
In 1958, McCarthy managed the successful campaign for State Senate of J. Eugene McAteer and then served as his administrative assistant in Sacramento. McCarthy attended San Francisco Law School at night while he worked as an aide to Senator McAteer — studying on the bus rides back and forth.
In 1963, McCarthy ran for office and was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, the youngest member in San Francisco’s history. During his four years in office, one of his many contributions was the creation of the city’s Human Rights Commission. In 1968, he was elected to the State Assembly, serving as speaker of the Assembly from 1974 to 1980. As speaker, McCarthy earned a reputation as a partisan, take-no-prisoners insider in Democratic Party politics.
McCarthy was elected to statewide office to the first of three consecutive four-year terms as lieutenant governor of California in 1982, retiring from public office at the end of his third term. His 12 years are the longest any California lieutenant governor has served. He later founded the Leo T. McCarthy Center for Public Service and the Common Good at the University of San Francisco.
Marvin E. Lewis, Sr. was one of San Francisco’s most revered trial lawyers and a former San Francisco supervisor. Lewis was founder and first president of the California Trial Lawyers Association, as well as president of the American Trial Lawyers and Western Trial Lawyers associations. As a city supervisor from 1944 to 1955, Lewis was an early advocate for the Bay Area Rapid Transit system and was also instrumental in the campaign to have street signs made with block numbers in the left corner.
One of Lewis’s early cases established him as a pioneer of the legal concept of psychological or “psychic” injury. Lewis argued that a client became psychotic after falling through a wooden stairway at her North Beach apartment. He is perhaps best known for a 1970 case the media dubbed “The Cable Car Named Desire” in which a jury ruled in favor of a young woman who allegedly lost her mental balance and became obsessively hypersexual after suffering a traumatic brain injury in a cable car accident. He went on to represent many other people with psychological injuries and wrote a multi-volume set of trial guides called “Psychic Injuries” in 1975.
A San Francisco native, Lewis excelled in school, skipping college and enrolling in San Francisco Law School, and becoming a member of the California Bar before he could vote.
Judge Jose Alva was born in Michoacan, Mexico and immigrated to the United States with his family as a child. The family settled in California where his father worked as a railroad laborer.
After high school, Alva matriculated at the University of the Pacific in Stockton, California in the school’s undergraduate teaching program. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in inter-American studies and social science and a Master of Arts degree in educational administration. Several weeks after graduating, he was drafted by the United States Army in the midst of the Vietnam War. During his military service, he was stationed in Germany.
After completing his military service, he returned to Stockton, California and worked briefly as an administrator at his alma mater, the University of the Pacific, before being appointed by former Governor Jerry Brown to serve as a county supervisor for the San Joaquin County Board of Supervisors in 1979.
After serving six years on the board, he decided to pursue a law degree. He attended Humphreys University School of Law, where he graduated with his Juris Doctor degree in 1989. He then worked for 16 years as a sole practitioner specializing in land-use, real property, business, and family law matters.
In 2006, he became the first Latino to be appointed to the Superior Court bench in San Joaquin County, California. He has served there as presiding judge and assistant presiding judge of the Court.
Bonnie M. Dumanis served for 14 years as District Attorney of San Diego County, California after having served for 8 years as a judge. She is the first openly lesbian/LGBT community member to serve as a district attorney in the nation, and first woman and first Jewish person elected as district attorney for San Diego.
Dumanis grew up in Brockton, Massachusetts and received a Bachelor of Arts degree in sociology from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She moved to California and began her career in San Diego County’s District Attorney’s office as a junior clerk typist, studying law at night, and received her Juris Doctor degree from Thomas Jefferson School of Law in 1976.
Following her admission to the State Bar of California in 1977, she served as a Deputy District Attorney from 1978 to 1990. In 1994, she was elected as Judge of the Municipal Court of San Diego County where she served for four years. She started the first Drug Courts in the county. In 1998, she was elected as Judge of the Superior Court.
Four years later, in 2002, she was elected to serve as District Attorney of San Diego County and held the office from 2003 to 2017. As district attorney, she made public safety her top priority, focusing on crime prevention, reducing recidivism, helping victims and keeping the office transparent and accessible to the people of San Diego County.
In addition to her time in public office, she has served on the California State Bar Association Board of Governors; on the California District Attorneys Association Board of Directors; on the Board of Directors of the San Diego Bar Association; and served as a Commissioner for California Peace Officers Standards and Training; as a member of the San Diego County Police Chiefs and Sheriff’s Association; as past president of the Lawyers Club of San Diego; and taught ethics at the University of San Diego School of Law.
Jan Scully was the first woman to serve as top prosecutor in Sacramento County and the first female District Attorney of any large California county.
She grew up in Sacramento, California and attended Loretto High School, graduated from California State University in Sacramento, and then attended Lincoln Law School, Sacramento while working full-time for the State of California.
After graduating from Lincoln, Scully began working as a deputy district attorney in the Sacramento County District Attorney’s Office. Five years later, she became a supervising attorney, supervising various prosecution teams including Adult Sexual Assault, Sexual Assault and Child Abuse, Felony Trials, and Research and Training.
She was first elected District Attorney in November 1994 and ran unopposed until her retirement in 2014 after 20 years in that office.
In 2005, Scully was the first woman elected to serve as president of the California District Attorneys Association and in 2006 was president of the Institute for the Advancement of Criminal Justice. In July 2011, she became the first woman to serve as president of the National District Attorneys Association (NDAA).
Barbara S. Fass was born in Denver, Colorado, the daughter of German Jewish immigrants. After graduating from the University of Michigan, she settled in Stockton, California, in the 1960s and began teaching. She was active in efforts to desegregate Stockton Unified schools, and eventually enrolled in law school at Humphreys College School of Law. In 1974, Fass and a few other graduates of Humphreys – the first women to earn law degrees from the school – opened Stockton’s first all-female law firm. Fass primarily practiced family law, but she also took on pro bono cases for farmworkers and other low-income clients who could not afford attorneys.
In 1985, Fass was elected mayor of Stockton, the first woman in the city’s history to hold the post. She became a leading advocate for banning assault rifles after a lone gunman opened fire on the Cleveland Elementary School playground, killing five children and wounding 29 other students and a teacher. As mayor and later member of the Stockton City Council, Fass was also known as an advocate for the city’s disenfranchised residents and minority communities. She worked with Cesar Chavez in support of farm laborers’ rights, and also worked to support the Hmong community.
Lewis F. Brown, Sr., was born in Cleveland, Mississippi. He moved to California in the 1950’s. After serving in the U.S. Army in the Korean War, he graduated from San Francisco State University with a Bachelor of Science degree in Political Science. Later, he earned a Juris Doctor degree from Lincoln Law School of San Jose and became a member of the State Bar of California in 1970.
Brown was a leader on the Democratic Central Committee of Solano County and was very involved in the California campaigns of both John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy. In 1965, he was the first African American in Solano County elected to office when elected to the City Council of Vallejo. He later became Vice Mayor; and in 1970 was the first African-American to practice law in Solano County, working with established attorney William Beeman. They were eventually partners in a firm that became Beeman, Bradley, Brown and Beeman.
Mr. Brown was a beloved, respected and influential citizen of Vallejo who is remembered in California as being a tireless advocate, especially for children and the under-privileged, and well-known for breaking through racial barriers as a lawyer, politician and businessman.
Oscar “Zeta” Acosta Fierro was a Mexican-American attorney, politician, writer, and activist in the Chicano movement. Acosta was born in El Paso, Texas, grew up in a small rural community in the San Joaquin Valley, California, and joined the U.S. Air Force after high school. Following his discharge from the military, he worked his way through Modesto Junior College and San Francisco State University where he studied creative writing, becoming the first member of his family to graduate from college. Acosta attended night classes at San Francisco Law School and passed the California state bar exam in 1966.
Acosta moved to Los Angeles where he is remembered for his successful defense of the Eastside 13, a group of men secretly indicted for organizing the 1968 L.A. school walkouts, which shed light on abject school conditions in predominantly Latino communities. Acosta is also known for his eccentric behavior in and out of the courtroom as well as his friendship with author Hunter S. Thompson. Thompson immortalized him as his sidekick and attorney, “Dr. Gonzo,” in the 1971 novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, a semi-autobiographical account.
Acosta authored two books, Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo and The Revolt of the Cockroach People, both reflecting his fervent civic and political activism on behalf of the Chicano movement.
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