Tuesday, April 23, 2019

DJ profiles Judge Bea

Today's DJ profile is Old World Gentleman: Never mistake good manners for friendliness, says 9th Circuit conservative Judge Carlos Bea. Some highlights:


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  • He’s the “Most Interesting Man on the 9th Circuit.” 
  • Escaping the violence of the Spanish Civil War, Bea and his family came to the United States when the future Article III judge was a boy. They traversed the country in a 1938 Buick and settled in Los Angeles.
  • He spent his college years under an order of deportation but took his case to the Board of Immigration Appeals and won. He played basketball for Cuba in the 1952 Helsinki Olympics and briefly as a professional in Madrid.
  • Now, he occasionally drives around San Francisco in a vintage Rolls Royce and lunches with a group known as the Calamari Club, comprised of the city’s old political and financial elite.
  • At 85, Bea is the oldest of the court’s active judges, and he isn’t showing signs of slowing down. 
  • Bea was born in 1934 in San Sebastian, Spain, a coastal town in the Basque region. At 5, prompted by his widowed mother’s fears of a Nazi invasion, Bea and his family fled to Cuba to escape his country’s civil war and the ascendancy of its eventual dictator, Francisco Franco.
  • Settling in Los Angeles, Bea grew up near Hancock Park and attended University High School, alma mater to fellow future 9th Circuit Judges Stephen Reinhardt and Raymond C. Fisher. It was during that time — when his family became entangled in a civil lawsuit — that Bea developed an interest in becoming a lawyer.
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    "I very much like being involved
    in the en banc process."