Leaving a Lasting Legacy

A year and a half into leading a historic effort to overhaul how Los Angeles City Hall works, USC law professor Erwin Chemerinsky found himself close to failure.

It was the first week of January 1999 and the charter reform commission that Chemerinsky had steered through months of sometimes agonizing negotiations was deserting him under pressure from then-Mayor Richard Riordan, who wanted to institute his own ideas on the city’s new constitution.

But Chemerinsky didn’t back down.

He and his allies prodded and persuaded commissioners to back a compromise that ultimately won voter support. The mild-mannered son of a working-class Jewish family from Chicago -- known mainly as a brilliant, slightly rumpled constitutional law professor -- had beaten the mayor and helped reshape the way Los Angeles is governed.

In the years since then, city leaders have asked him to help Los Angeles navigate through some of its most vexing problems, including police misconduct and possible corruption in city contracting.

Today, after 21 years in Los Angeles, Chemerinsky is leaving. He, his family and his dog are scheduled to board a red-eye flight for North Carolina, where Chemerinsky has taken a post at Duke University School of Law.

“I’ll never have the chance anywhere else I live to be involved in issues the way I was in Los Angeles,” Chemerinsky said as he reflected on his work.

Throughout its history, Los Angeles has turned to prominent citizens to help alter the city’s course in the wake of scandal or violence.

A decade ago, high-powered attorney Warren Christopher headed a commission that investigated the beating of Rodney G. King by Los Angeles police officers. And entrepreneur Peter Ueberroth led an effort to rebuild South Los Angeles after the 1992 riots that followed the acquittal of the officers who attacked King.

“When an issue is too hot to handle, when it’s too sensitive or explosive, you put people like Erwin on it,” said civil rights attorney Connie Rice, chairwoman of a police review panel that includes Chemerinsky.

“There are very few people in this city who don’t have personal agendas,” said Rice, a longtime Chemerinsky admirer. “Erwin doesn’t want to get elected. He doesn’t want to reach into somebody’s pocket. He doesn’t want a contract for one of his friends.”

Mayor James K. Hahn, who worked with Chemerinsky on charter reform and earlier this year appointed him to head a blue-ribbon panel to review city contracting, said, “I don’t know how a major city like Los Angeles can exist without people like Erwin Chemerinsky.”

The 51-year-old legal scholar’s curriculum vitae matches that of the city’s earlier civic reformers.

The author of a standard textbook on constitutional law, the liberal law professor has argued against California’s tough three-strikes sentencing law before the U.S. Supreme Court and is a frequent and outspoken defender of civil liberties and civil rights. A decade ago, he helped write the constitution of Belarus after the country won independence after the breakup of the Soviet Union.

But the casual observer could be forgiven for underestimating the unassuming academic, whose gentleness and patience belie what many say is a fierce determination and awesome capacity for work.

As chairman of an elected commission created to rewrite the municipal constitution that controlled everything from the size of the City Council to the power of the mayor to fire city department heads, Chemerinsky walked onto a political battlefield on which Riordan and members of the City Council were fighting for control of city government.

“You had a pretty volatile situation,” said George Kieffer, an influential attorney and political veteran who heads the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce and led an appointed charter reform commission. “There were very few people who thought, in the end, it could work.”

Over more than a year of debate and diplomacy, Chemerinsky did not just stand up to the power plays of council members and the mayor, whose chief of staff at one point asked him to resign. His steady determination to craft a compromise was instrumental in enacting the first substantive change to the Los Angeles City Charter in 75 years, according to Kieffer and others.

“Our commission was held together with bailing wire and rubber bands,” said Councilman Dennis Zine, a former police sergeant and police union leader who served on the panel with Chemerinsky before Zine ran for office. “He was able to bring different parties together. It was amazing.”

Zine, whose Republican politics are on the other side of the political spectrum from Chemerinsky’s, said he still considered Chemerinsky a friend.

“The charter experience showed that this academic could get in and play hardball in the service of a cause he believed in,” said Raphael Sonenshein, a Cal State Fullerton political scientist who served as executive director of one of the two charter commissions.

Not everyone was thrilled with Chemerinsky’s work. Democratic Assemblywoman Jackie Goldberg (D-Los Angeles), who had encouraged him to run for the charter reform commission, said the increased power of the mayor has undermined the public’s access to city government.

“I think he did the city a great service,” said Goldberg, who has remained a close friend. “But all of us, we kind of got outfoxed by the mayor.”

But to fans of the revised charter, new institutions for neighborhood representation in City Hall, new powers for an inspector general to oversee the Police Department and added oversight of the city’s finances were historic achievements.

And after voters approved the charter in 1999, Chemerinsky became one of its staunchest defenders. Though a leading supporter of increasing mayoral power, Chemerinsky did not hesitate to attack Riordan when the mayor later circumvented controls on his budgetary authority.

Chemerinsky labeled the move “outrageous” in an opinion piece for The Times, one of 74 he has written for The Times over the last 12 years.

Riordan, who is now Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s education secretary, was unavailable for comment all week, according to a spokeswoman.

Chemerinsky became an even more outspoken critic of Riordan when allegations surfaced in 1999 that officers in the Los Angeles Police Department’s Rampart Division had been systematically planting evidence, lying and abusing Angelenos.

Chemerinsky berated Riordan and then-Police Chief Bernard C. Parks for stonewalling investigations, at one point commenting, “There has been no way whatsoever in which Riordan has been a force for positive change in the Police Department.”

Amid growing criticism that city leaders were trying to minimize the scandal, Chemerinsky was called upon by the police union to prepare an analysis of the Police Department. Chemerinsky threw himself into the effort, interviewing dozens of officers and others and producing a 154-page report -- subsequently endorsed not just by the police union, but also by civil rights lawyers -- that recommended sweeping reform to prosecute rough officers and protect those who report misconduct.

Chemerinsky still tells the story of a police officer who appeared in his office to ask who could protect him if he exposed terrible abuses he had seen. “I had to tell him there was nowhere he could go,” Chemerinsky said sadly.

Parks, whom Hahn did not reappoint as police chief two years ago, declined to comment for this article. (During the Rampart scandal, Parks accused Chemerinsky of being “in bed” with the police union.)

But many involved in reviewing the Police Department in recent years applauded Chemerinsky’s persistent calls for more oversight.

“He is one of the most thoughtful, intelligent voices for police reform,” said Jeff Eglash, a former federal prosecutor who served as police inspector general from 1999 to 2002. “He doesn’t come up with extreme positions, but takes a longer view.”

Last year, the Police Commission tapped Chemerinsky for a new panel to review the Police Department’s response to the Rampart scandal.

To this day, Chemerinsky said one of his biggest regrets was not having been able to install more controls over the Police Department.

“The code of silence is still deeply embedded in the LAPD,” he said, pointing to an ongoing investigation of an alleged cover-up following last month’s televised police beating of suspected car thief Stanley Miller. “Things are better, but there is still a long way to go.”

Chemerinsky also lamented that there were still no whistle-blower protections for police officers. “That should have been in the charter,” he said.

But, he observed, Los Angeles changes slowly. “It’s very difficult to bring about change in this city without crisis,” Chemerinsky said.

Through his continuing work on the Rampart panel and Hahn’s blue-ribbon commission on contracting reform, Chemerinsky said he planned to continue helping Los Angeles as much as he could. Though Chemerinsky said he and his family were moving to Durham, N.C., to live in a smaller city, they were keeping an apartment in Park La Brea.

But Chemerinsky acknowledged that he would not be able to do as much from across the continent. “If the next police scandal breaks in Los Angeles, I probably won’t be able to be part of the solution. That’s a huge loss for me.”

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Erwin Chemerinsky

Age: 51

Education: B.S., 1975, Northwestern University; J.D., 1978, Harvard Law School

Family: Wife, Catherine Fisk, 42, a law professor; children, Alex, 9, and Mara, 6; and Jeff, 21, and Adam, 18, from a previous marriage

Legal career: U.S. Department of Justice, 1978-79; Dobrovir, Oates & Gebhardt, District of Columbia, 1979-80; assistant professor, De Paul University, Chicago, 1980-83; associate professor, De Paul, 1983-84; visiting associate professor, University of Southern California Law School, 1983-84; associate professor, USC, 1984-87; professor, USC, 1987-2004

Civic activities: Board of directors, American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, 1987-98; board of directors, American Jewish Congress, 1993-98; chairman, Elected Los Angeles Charter Reform Commission, 1997-99; Governor’s Task Force on Diversity in State Government, 1999-2000; board of directors, Progressive Jewish Alliance, 2000-present; member, Los Angeles Police Commission panel on Rampart, 2003-present; chairman, Los Angeles Mayor James K. Hahn’s Blue-Ribbon Commission on Contracting, 2004

Los Angeles Times