Entrance to the former Hastings College of the Law at UC San Francisco
WASHINGTON, D.C. — The U.S. Supreme Court has turned aside a bid by the descendants of California's first state Supreme Court chief justice to declare state lawmakers violated the Constitution by disparaging his name and reputation and passing a law that broke a contract and removed his name from a Bay Area law school, as punishment for their ancestor's alleged historical misdeeds.
On Oct. 19, the high court denied the petition from the Hastings College Conservation Committee and members of the family of Serranous Clinton (S.C.) Hastings, asking the U.S. Supreme Court to step into the dispute over the state's actions against Hastings and his descendants and allow them to resume their lawsuit against the state.
The Supreme Court did not explain its decision to deny the petition and no justices dissented.
The dispute landed in court in 2023 after the Democrat-dominated California state legislature passed a law renaming the former "Hastings College of the Law" to "College of the Law, San Francisco."
The legislation also deleted from the state Education Code a requirement that one college board member “shall always be an heir or representative of S.C. Hastings.”
In addition to other judicial and political posts, S.C. Hastings led the California Supreme Court from 1849-1851 and later served two years as the state’s attorney general. According to court records, he was, by 1870, one of the state’s most prolific landowners. He founded the school in 1878 through a $100,000 payment to the public treasury and in coordination with a new state law stipulating the college would have a board of directors independent of the state regents who would be paid, by the state, $7,000 per year.
Adjusted for inflation $100,000 from 1878 would be equal to about $3.36 million in 2026, while $7,000 would be equal to more than $236,000.
Court records trace renaming of the school to a 2017 San Francisco Chronicle report that detailed Hastings’ alleged role “in fomenting violence and atrocities” against the native inhabitants of what now is Mendocino County and his “role in the killing of indigenous people in Northern California in the mid-19th century.” Although school officials initially recommended keeping the name and pursuing “other restorative justice initiatives,” subsequent New York Times coverage in October 2021 led to board approval of a change.
In response to the legislation, Hastings' descendants and the Hastings College Conservation Committee filed suit, asserting the new law and name change violated a still-valid deal between the state and the Hastings family and amounted to unconstitutional acts to posthumously punish S.C. Hastings and his descendants.
Their lawsuit, however, was tossed in both Alameda County Superior Court and on appeal by the California First District Court of Appeal.
In their ruling, the First District justices said the past deal between the state and Hastings failed when weighed against the state's right to "manage its own institutions or agencies."
And they said the state was free to target Hastings and his descendants because Hastings is long dead and can't be imprisoned or fined. Further, they asserted they believed lawmakers didn't intend to punish the Hastings family, but rather to address the current needs of the Yuki people, the descendants of the Native Americans Hastings was accused of harming.
After the California Supreme Court refused to review the case, the Hastings family appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.
There, they argued the state's actions amounted to violations of their rights to protection under the U.S. Constitution and illegal posthumous punishment visited upon living descendants for the alleged misdeeds of their ancestor.
In their petition, they noted the state further refused to allow the family to "recover even the funds paid by S.C. Hastings to secure ... the vested statutory and contractual interests of S.C. Hastings and his descendants."
In response, the state urged the high court to reject the petition, saying the Constitution should not be read to allow any contract to override the state's authority to "regulate 'public matters and bodies'" and preserve its sovereignty.
The California appeals court's decision, they said, "held only that the Legislature lacked power to perpetually contract away its authority to name and determine the leadership qualifications of flagship university institutions."
And the state said there is legally no way for lawmakers to violate constitutional protections against being singled out by a law "that had the sole effect of imposing reputational harm on a long-deceased public figure."
The Hastings Committee and the family were represented before the Supreme Court by attorneys Gregory Michael and Dorothy C. Yamamoto, of Michael Yamamoto, of Berkeley; and John-Paul Deol, of the Dhillon Law Group, of San Francisco.
Scott Holland contributed to this report.
