Bird Rises Above the Bitter Campaign on a Visit Down Under

SYDNEY, Australia â€”  More than 7,500 miles from her bitter reelection campaign, California Chief Justice Rose Elizabeth Bird found herself among friends Monday as she began a week as the guest of honor of local government officials during Law Week here.

“She is very modern and hip, the kind of female I would like to see more often on the bench,� said Paula Paizes, a Sydney attorney who specializes in cases involving the news media.

“Let’s face it, there is a lot more interest in her not just because she is a woman judge, and we don’t have many of those, but because she is a different sort of woman. She makes an effort to look like a woman and not the sort of doddering fossil we tend to think of when we think of lady lawyers,� said Terry Purcell, director of the Law Foundation of New South Wales, one of the sponsors of Law Week.

Purcell and New South Wales Atty. Gen. Terry Sheehan invited Bird to Law Week after meeting her last year during a visit to the California Supreme Court.

At least one newspaper also offered a warm welcome to Bird with an article appearing on the day of her arrival that said of her career on the bench: “By any objective assessment, she has conducted herself with wisdom, principle and efficiency.�

Although Bird’s weeklong trip--which was preceded by a week’s vacation in New Zealand--comes in the midst of an uphill struggle for reelection, the chief justice said she did not think h er campaign would suffer as a result of her absence.

“The most we try to do is keep them (her opponents) honest on the facts, and they will say what they want anyway,� Bird said.

The chief justice also said that her judicial duties were comparatively light these days, requiring little preparation for the upcoming calendar of cases.

A Lot of Rehearings

“The May calendar consists of a lot of rehearings that I know very well and have even written about in the past,� she said.

Bird spent much of her first day here asking questions about the habits of a place she had never been and answering questions, many from people who had never met a female high court judge.

During a brief tour of the city, Bird was intrigued by the local graffiti and curious about the cost of housing and mortgage interest rates. (They are 15% and rising.) But mostly she wanted to know about the lot of women here. How old are most when they marry? Do men do housework?

None of her hosts had definitive answers. But they did have questions of their own.

Would the chief justice consider becoming a single mother?

“No,� she replied. But she said she has thought about adopting a child.

Was it hard growing up poor as the child of a single, working mother?

“It was hard. Sometimes I say to myself I was 80 when I was 5,� Bird replied.

Reelection Prospects

Will she survive the attacks on her and win reelection?

“Yes. I think so,� Bird replied.

The theme of Law Week is family law, a subject of great concern to the local judiciary, which has seen one family court judge murdered and the wife of another slain during the last year. In both cases, the killers are believed to be parents angered over the outcome of child custody cases.

But during Bird’s first day here, the questions directed at her by local reporters had a lot more to do with California legal issues than with ones affecting Australians.

Bird was not here long before the issue of the death penalty was raised. It is currently banned in Australia.

One Sydney radio station had obtained a tape frequently used by Bird’s opponents in California in which the grandmother of a brutally murdered infant girl, Amy Sue Seitz, exhorts voters to defeat the chief justice.

Amy Sue’s convicted murderer, Theodore Frank, was sentenced to death, but Bird and a majority of the California Supreme Court voted to overturn Frank’s sentence because the court ruled that certain evidence had been improperly seized.

Centerpiece of Opposition

The Frank case has become the centerpiece of the campaign against Bird. But if Bird was surprised to hear about it so far from home, she didn’t show it. Rather, she said what she has often said before--that her heart went out to Amy Sue’s grandmother and that she could understand that someone so afflicted by personal tragedy might never be able to appreciate the need to uphold legal procedures even in cases involving defendants such as Frank.

Bird’s reputation as a liberal jurist preceded her to Australia. But here, as in the United States, she didn’t let the label go unchallenged.

“I’m not quite the way you are describing me,� she told a television station interviewer who had described her as a “liberal reformist.�

“Judges in America are nonpolitical,� Bird said.

Official Opening

Besides appearing on radio and television interview programs Monday, Bird was on hand for the official opening of Law Week, an event designed to give Australians a detailed look at the services provided by lawyers.

Accompanied by her executive assistant, Stephen Buehl, and Ralph Gampell, who heads the administrative office of the Supreme Court, Bird is scheduled today to travel to Canberra, the capital of Australia, where she is to meet with American Ambassador William Lane and speak to the National Press Club in a nationally broadcast address.

The rest of the week Bird is scheduled to be in Sydney, the largest city in New South Wales, which is one of Australia’s six states. She is expected to make several more speeches on aspects of the law, as well tour the city’s picturesque harbor and attend a performance of the Australian Ballet Company at the Sydney Opera House.