Court of Appeal Presiding Justice Arthur Gilbert’s most recent installment of his long-running Daily Journal column, “A name on a building,” praises former Justice Stanley Mosk, who served a record 36+ years on the Supreme Court. Justice Gilbert laments that “some young lawyers and judges know . . . Mosk only as the name of a building that houses the Los Angeles Superior Court at 110 N. Grand Ave.”
The piece focuses on a decision Mosk made before he joined the high court, refusing as a superior court judge in 1947 to enforce deeds’ restrictive covenants that would have prevented Black families from moving into homes they had bought in the Hancock Park neighborhood of Los Angeles. (See Braitman and Uelmen, “Justice Stanley Mosk: A Life at the Center of California Politics and Justice” (2013), pp. 67-68; Bob Wolfe, “Unholy Covenants: How California Courts Came to Enforce Racial and Ethnic Restrictions on Housing and Their Impact Today,” California Supreme Court Historical Society Review (Spring/Summer 2025), p. 19; also here.) The ruling preceded by a year the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark opinion in Shelley v. Kraemer (1948) 334 U.S. 1, which came to the same conclusion.
