High Court Nominee Ready for a Long Run : Legal system: Ronald Marc George could carry conservative majority well into 21st Century.

SAN FRANCISCO —  A hiker, marathoner and just 51 years old, Ronald Marc George appears well equipped for a long and productive career on the California Supreme Court.

That prospect pleases the high court’s conservative backers--and dismays its liberal critics.

George, a member of the state Court of Appeal in Los Angeles, was nominated last week by Gov. Pete Wilson to succeed retiring Justice Allen E. Broussard, the court’s only black jurist and its next-to-last liberal.

Barring unexpected developments, it seems assured that George will be confirmed by the state Judicial Appointments Commission at a hearing in Los Angeles on Sept. 3. The commission has not rejected a high court nominee since 1940.

George, a former state prosecutor and a trial and appellate court judge for 19 years, is widely viewed as bringing to the high court more of the same moderate-to-conservative legal philosophy held by the five appointees of Republican Gov. George Deukmejian, who command a majority.

He would be the sixth of seven justices to be chosen by a Republican governor. Although George prefers to avoid labels that fix him on the political spectrum, his track record of judicial restraint appears to put him in the conservative camp.

Significantly, with George’s appointment, that conservative majority seems destined to remain intact for many years--perhaps well into the 21st Century. Four justices--Edward A. Panelli, Armand Arabian, Joyce L. Kennard and Marvin R. Baxter--are all in their 50s. Chief Justice Malcolm M. Lucas is 64, but offers no hint of retiring. Justice Stanley Mosk, an appointee of Democratic Gov. Edmund G. (Pat) Brown and now the lone liberal, is 79.

Lucas was elevated to the top post after Chief Justice Rose Elizabeth Bird and two other liberal jurists were defeated in the 1986 election. Under him, the court’s path has swung abruptly from left to right--particularly in limiting the rights of condemned killers and other criminal defendants. With another conservative on the court, that course seems all the more certain--an unsettling prospect for the court’s critics.

“I’m 47 years old and I’m afraid that in my lifetime I am never going to see the California Supreme Court as protective of individual rights . . . as it was in the past,” said Alan Ellis of Mill Valley, president of the National Assn. of Criminal Defense Lawyers.

“The court is going to consist of justices who will be enlisting as foot soldiers in the governor’s war on crime,” Ellis said. “And that’s not what their role should be.”

Law enforcement supporters welcome the addition of a relatively young, conservative and--by all accounts--highly able jurist. A long-running, conservative-dominated court does not bother them at all.

“We’re going to get used to the people now on this court--and that’s a good thing,” said Michael Rushford, president of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation in Sacramento. “The public is getting the kind of court it asked for . . . and this is the kind of appointment that will raise the court to the leadership role of the judiciary that it once held.”

In civil cases, the Lucas Court has proved much more receptive to the claims of employers, insurers and other businesses than the Bird Court was. But how George will vote on major civil issues is an open question.

“On the civil side, I’d put him pretty much in the middle--neither pro-business nor pro-consumer, neither pro-plaintiff nor pro-defendant,” said Ellis J. Horvitz of Encino, a lawyer who often represents businesses before the court. George, he said, could join other court moderates to form a pivotal centrist bloc on important civil cases. If that happens, “we’ll have our work cut out for us,” Horvitz said.

George is uncomfortable with such labels as conservative or liberal . In an interview Monday, the day he was appointed by Wilson, George said he feels his record on the Court of Appeal reflects “an adherence to the concept of judicial restraint, and deference to the separation of powers.”

Put another way, he interprets the law, but he believes in letting the Legislature make the law.

George’s philosophy of restraint has emerged frequently in key appellate opinions he has written. For example:

* In 1988, George issued a lengthy dissent when the appeal panel ruled that the Los Angeles Police Department must speed the arraignments of arrested prisoners and permit family and friends to visit them at the jail.

George said the court lacked authority for the new rules it imposed on the police. “Although many of the improvements . . . may be socially desirable, if they are to come into being, they should be effected appropriately by legislative enactment rather than by judicial decree,” he wrote.

* Writing for the court in 1989, George refused to allow a man to bring suit against a hospital for the wrongful death of a woman he had lived with for 11 years but not married. The man’s good-faith belief that he and the woman had a “common law marriage”--abolished in California in 1895--was not sufficient to permit him to sue as though he were her husband, George said.

* George dissented in 1988, when the appeal court granted medical patients a right to share in any profits made from the commercial use of body tissues removed during an operation, a finding later overturned by the state Supreme Court.

There was no legal basis for the appellate majority’s conclusion that patients have a “property right” to surgically removed tissue, he said. “I am not prepared to extend the constitutionally sanctified right of property to the refuse found on the floor of the barbershop or nail salon, in the hospital bedpan, or in the operating room receptacle,” he wrote.

* George disagreed in 1988, when the court struck down a state law making it a crime to make annoying or harassing anonymous telephone calls. The court, saying that the prohibition violated the right to free speech, overturned the conviction of a woman accused of repeatedly telephoning her former boyfriend and his wife and hanging up without identifying herself.

In George’s view, the woman’s practice of making half a dozen such calls every day did not constitute “attempts at speech or communication in any form,” and thus was not protected by the Constitution.

Whatever his views on judicial restraint, in one significant case, George expanded the law when he felt compelled to do so by precedent-setting decisions.

Last month, he wrote a unanimous opinion for the appellate court barring attorneys in civil cases from using peremptory challenges to exclude prospective jurors based on their sex. The ruling came in a case involving a business dispute between a woman and her former husband. The man’s lawyer used seven of his eight challenges--for which no reason must be given--to remove women jurors.

George relied primarily on a landmark 1978 state high court ruling that already barred the use of such challenges in criminal cases to exclude black jurors. He also cited more recent rulings prohibiting racial bias in civil cases.

In other notable cases, George has voted to uphold contentions made by the prosecution.

In 1987, the appeal court barred the use of statements to police by a suspect on the grounds that even though the suspect had waived his right to counsel, his attorney had been unable to reach him at the jail. George dissented with that finding, and on appeal, the high court overturned the ruling. A year later, George wrote a new decision for the appeal court upholding the use of the statements.

Last year, he wrote a court opinion allowing a defendant to be charged with the murder of his accomplices for initiating a gun battle with a robbery victim that ended in the accomplices’ deaths. Although the defendant fled after the battle began, his actions were a substantial factor in the deaths of his accomplices, and the defendant could be held criminally responsible, George said.

Earlier this year, he issued an opinion overturning the dismissal of murder charges against a defendant who had fled to Venezuela eight years before. The case had been dropped by a trial court on the grounds that the government had not exerted itself enough to find the defendant and that the eight-year delay in apprehending him violated his right to a speedy trial.

George, reinstating the charges, held that a defendant who flees to avoid prosecution waives the right to a speedy trial. “No man can take advantage of his own wrong,” George said, quoting a legal maxim. “It is well settled that the constitutional guaranty of a speedy trial . . . does not operate in favor of a fugitive from justice.”