Richardson, Frank Kellogg (01058364): Difference between revisions

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'''Frank Kellogg Richardson''' (13 February 1914 – 5 October 1999) was an American attorney and Army intelligence officer who trained at [[Camp Ritchie]] and served in Europe during World War II, and who later was an Associate Justice of the California Supreme Court (1974–1983).

Frank Kellogg Richardson was born on 13 February 1914 in St. Helena, California, and graduated from Germantown High School in Philadelphia. After a freshman year at the University of Pennsylvania he transferred to Stanford University, earning an AB with distinction in political science in 1935 and election to Phi Beta Kappa, and received his LLB from Stanford Law School in 1938. Admitted to the California bar that year, he practiced law in Oroville, sharing an office with retired Butte County Judge Hirman Gregory.

Richardson served in the Army from 1942 to 1945 and trained at the Military Intelligence Training Center at Camp Ritchie, including Japanese order-of-battle training (Class 18). He married Betty Kingdon, whom he had met while ushering at the local Methodist church, on 23 January 1943; they had four sons. In 1944, as a second lieutenant in Army intelligence, he was assigned to the top-secret Ultra project at Bletchley Park in England. Learning that Winston Churchill would address Parliament on the war in the Balkans, he talked his way through several layers of security in uniform with U.S. Embassy papers and was seated in the Distinguished Visitors Gallery beside the Archbishop of Canterbury. He ended the war as a first lieutenant with two service stars.

After the war Richardson returned to private practice in Sacramento, where he taught at the McGeorge School of Law from 1946 to 1952, and in 1962 he was president of the Sacramento County Bar Association. Governor Ronald Reagan appointed him presiding judge of the Sacramento County Superior Court in 1970, presiding justice of the Third District Court of Appeal in October 1971, and an Associate Justice of the California Supreme Court in 1974; he was retained by the voters in November 1978. On the court he wrote 182 majority opinions and 212 dissents, including majority opinions upholding Proposition 13 and the Victims' Bill of Rights and reaffirming the constitutionality of California's death penalty, and several of his dissents later became models for majority rulings. He retired from the court on 2 December 1983, was a visiting professor at Pepperdine University School of Law in 1984, served as solicitor of the U.S. Department of the Interior under President Reagan, and in 1985 became a Nixon Fellow at Whittier Law School. Richardson died of complications of Parkinson's disease at his home in Sacramento on 5 October 1999.