Commission continues Mason's work.

• Author: Fisher, Karen
• Position: Mason's Manual Revision Committee; Paul Mason - Includes related article

Paul Mason worked diligently for more than 40 years to keep legislators up to date on parliamentary law. Now a seasoned commission has taken up where he left off.

Until 1985, when a committee of legislative clerks and secretaries began revising Mason's Manual of Legislative Procedures, this indispensable reference was the work of one man, devoted parliamentarian Paul Mason.

Mason took to rules early. Asked which important books he remembered from his childhood home, he responded immediately, "Robert's Rules of Order . . . and then there were some scientific books."

As a graduate student in political science at Stanford in the early 1920s, Mason built on his interest. He wrote his master's thesis on procedure in the California Legislature, and he went to work there as a clerk as soon as he finished his degree. He was admitted to the California bar in 1923.

During his 10 years in the Legislature, Mason was assistant legislative counsel and then assistant secretary of the Senate, working with longtime secretary Joe Beek. "Joe really was not a parliamentarian," says former Senate secretary James Driscoll. "A lot of clerships are political in nature and administrative in function, but someplace along the line you need a parliamentarian, and Paul was there for that." He never was officially named parliamentarian, however.

Among his many other endeavors, Mason later served as legislative secretary to Governor Goodwin Knight and parliamentarian for Lieutenant Governor Bob Finch.

Enthralled with the law as well as with procedure, in 1931 Mason compiled the Annotated Edition of the State Constitution of California--a two-volume, 2,400-page work--and updated it three times in the next 22 years.

Mason first published his Manual of Legislative Procedure for the California Legislature in 1935. At the request of the American Legislators Association, he made it available to lawmakers in other state as a ready source of the rules of parliamentary law. As the manual was adopted in more and more states, Mason revised it six times from 1937 to 1979. Today, all state legislatures use Mason's Manual, and in 63 of the 99 state chambers it is the primary parliamentary authority.

"Mason was a very scholarly person," says Darryl White, a former secretary of the California Senate. "Mason's Manual took an awful lot of work, going through all those court cases. He liked to do that kind of painstaking research."

Unlike guides such as Robert's Rules, Mason's procedures are based on his belief that parliamentary law is in fact law. He believed that the courts...