Zerne Haning 6053

Retired Associate Justice Zerne P. Haning was appointed to the newly created position of associate justice in the newly created Division Five of the First District Court of Appeal in California by Governor Jerry Brown in 1982. Justice Haning and his colleagues had to scramble to find offices and hire staff, and faced an enormous backlog of cases that had been fully briefed for over four years. They divided the cases by area of law, and had a waiting system from one to five to divide the workload. They also had an active settlement program sponsored by the American Bar Association, and used yellow pads and pens, a very primitive form of word processing, and Scotch tape for their work. The Loma Prieta earthquake caused huge chunks of rubble to fall on the stairways and bookcases to collapse, but the seismic bookshelves they had just installed worked and they did not lose their library.