Last week, the California Court of Appeal ruled that the de-naming lawsuit brought by the descendants of donor S.C. Hastings against the State and administrators of the College of the Law, San Francisco, formerly known as UC Hastings, can move forward.
A copy of the full opinion is at the bottom of this post.
We covered the controversy behind the story here:
As we wrote earlier, last July, the board of directors at UC-Hastings College of the Law voted to change the school’s name to College of the Law, San Francisco. The name was officially changed by the California state legislature in a bill passed into law (AB 1936) effective on January 1st of this year.
The school’s namesake, Serranus Clinton Hastings, was the first chief justice of California and was linked to the killing of Native Americans in the 1850s.
In 1878, S.C. Hastings donated $100,000 under an agreement with the State to establish the law school bearing his name. The agreement was written into state law, which provided that the school “shall forever be known and designated as the Hastings College of the Law.”
Last October, Hastings’ descendants and a group of Hastings alumni sued both the State and administrators of the law school to stop them from changing the law school’s name.
The law school’s administrators asked the trial court to dismiss the lawsuit under California’s anti-SLAPP statute, arguing that their right to use the new name of the law school is protected free speech.
The trial court rejected their bid, because none of the plaintiffs’ claims were based on the defendants’ protected activity. They were based on the State Legislature’s enactment of the law, AB 1936, de-naming the law school.
The appellate court agreed:
We can agree that the success of plaintiffs’ claims would, at a minimum, prevent the College Defendants [i.e., the administrators] from expressing a new official designation for the College, but even assuming that future speech in which the College Defendants use the new name is protected activity within the meaning of the anti-SLAPP statute, it is not the reason plaintiffs have sued them. Because plaintiffs’ claims are not based on the College Defendants’ speech, we conclude that the trial court properly denied the motion.
The Hastings alumni and heirs are represented by the Center for American Liberty and the Dhillon Law Group*: “The appellate court absolutely got it right,” said Mark Trammell, executive director of the Center for American Liberty. “Our clients are clearly challenging the constitutionality of AB 1936, not the defendants’ speech. Any attempt to characterize our clients’ claims as anything but a constitutional challenge is a lame attempt to evade justice.”
* My husband Ron Coleman is a partner in the Dhillon firm.
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