Keynote address.

• Author: George, Ronald M.
• Position: Symposium: State Constitutions

It is a great pleasure to return once again to Stanford Law School, where in 1964 a J.D. degree launched me into a seven year legal career as a California Deputy Attorney General and what, to this point, has been an almost thirty-eight year career as a judge.

The class that I most enjoyed in law school was Constitutional Law, and I was fortunate to have Gerald Gunther as my professor. The educational experience provided by that class no doubt had a substantial bearing upon my decision to enter the field of public law.

Stimulating and comprehensive as Professor Gunther's course was, the subject of state constitutional law was rarely if ever mentioned here or elsewhere. Ultimately United States Supreme Court Justice William Brennan and my late colleague California Supreme Court Justice Stanley Mosk wrote extensively on the subject, but the focus has remained even to this day almost exclusively on the federal aspects of constitutional law.

Perhaps this focus is natural and inevitable, given the circumstance that our pre-eminent law schools consider themselves "national" institutions of learning, but this imbalance gives inadequate attention to the reality that more than ninety-five percent of the cases heard in American courts are filed in state courts rather than federal courts. And, of course, federal courts often have to contend with issues of state law even though they do not have the final word in resolving those issues.

In light of this background, it is particularly fitting that a Symposium on state constitutions has been organized by the Stanford Law Review, with the participation of the Stanford Constitutional Law Center and the Stanford chapters of the Federalist Society and the American Constitution Society. As stated by the planners in announcing the Symposium, "This is an area of the law that has been insufficiently addressed in the legal literature, yet is a critically important source of law in our system of federalism."

Your ambitious range of topics is too broad for any one speaker to address, and thus I shall leave it to others to discuss theoretical issues of state constitutions, contemporary issues of state constitutional law such as gay marriage and abortion rights--although I have authored opinions for the California Supreme Court on those subjects, how state constitutional provisions can inform the common law, and the bearing of those provisions on judicial elections and judicial ethics.

I intend to focus, in the time allotted to me, upon the ramifications of the provisions of California's State Constitution--with some comparisons to the constitutions of other jurisdictions--that afford public participation in direct democracy through the initiative process. I also shall comment upon how this process has led to the ease with which California's Constitution can be--and regularly is--amended, resulting in the perpetual instability of California's state constitutional law.

The subject of initiative measures to amend California's constitution has of necessity been a matter of continued professional concern to me--the interpretation of state constitutional provisions certainly qualifies as an occupational hazard for any state high-court jurist. But this subject also has troubled me as an individual resident of this state who periodically is called upon to vote at the polls on ballot proposals to change our state constitution, and as one who--like all Californians--has to live with the consequences when these measures pass, especially when they involve the structure and powers of state and local government.

In 1898, South Dakota authorized voter initiatives, becoming the first of about two dozen states to...