Born: Monday, September 17th, 1923
Birthplace: Bantry, North Dakota
Education: Jamestown College, B.A. (1947)
University of Michigan, LL.B. (1950)
Career: Law Associate (1950-1951)
Office of Price Stabilization (1951-1952)
Court of Appeals (1969-1982)
Served: Monday, January 18th, 1982 to Tuesday, October 31st, 1989
Chief Justice: Saturday, January 10th, 1987 to Monday, January 9th, 1989
Political Party: Republican
Appointing Governor: Spellman (Republican)
Initial impressions are clearly incomplete. When one meets Justice Vernon R. Pearson, he appears unassuming, soft-spoken, hesitantly thoughtful, gregarious yet shy. These traits do reflect the man, but what is often missed is a sharp, decisive, competitive, but open legal mind. All these characteristics reflect the justice’s background.Vernon was the second son of Reverend Claude M. and Golda Mae Pearson. Claude, his older brother, became a lawyer; Richard, born three years after Vernon, a chemist. A younger sister died at age six. The life of a Methodist minister and his family in rural North Dakota was not easy. Later, Justice Pearson recalled these early years:
We lived a simpler life when I was a child. I grew up in North Dakota during the Great Depression. My father was a Methodist minister who served many small rural churches in the North Dakota conference. We moved frequently. Conditions at times were bleak when the crop failures caused by soil erosion were at their worst in the 1930s. Our clothes came from missionary boxes and our food from handouts. It was truly the worst of times and yet I have nothing but happy memories about it because there was always love and hope – optimism in our home.
The family knew poverty but also love and hope, and Vernon’s parents instilled a respect for freedom and Christianity in their children.
Vernon attended a number of public schools, graduating in 1941 from Cando High School in North Dakota where he competed in football, basketball, and track while participating in debate, drama, and choir. Following graduation he enrolled at Jamestown College on an academic scholarship. The scholarship covered only tuition and books, so he worked evenings and weekends at the local J. C. Penney store to cover other expenses. He participated in drama productions and competed on the debate team. After his sophomore year, World War II interrupted Vernon’s schooling. He enlisted in the navy.
The navy assigned the future judge to a naval officers’ training program at Minot State Teachers College, then transferred him to midshipmen’s school at Cornell University. From there he went to Ft. Pierce in Florida to complete officer training. Reassigned to Providence, Rhode Island, to train as a commander of landing ships, Pearson became boat division officer on the U. S. S. Sylvania. On his first combat mission he picked up an engineering battalion in Marseille, France, and took it through the Panama Canal to join in the landing on Luzon in the retaking of the Philippines. He later became a navigator responsible for landing troops in Japan as part of the occupation. Pearson, ordered to participate in the atomic bomb testing project on Bikini Island, had his military enlistment extended for six months. Part of a team responsible for charting the island’s waters in preparation for the test, Pearson took one of the last planes out of the island before the atomic bomb went off. Honorably discharged in 1946, he left the navy with the rank of lieutenant, junior grade.
A non-combat assignment while in the service convinced Pearson to choose law as his profession. The military tried people accused of serious disciplinary infractions before an officer hearing board, where lawyer and non-lawyer officers defended them. Pearson served as prosecuting “counsel” for a number of these hearings. The give-and-take of the adversarial process stimulated his interest.
The newly discharged veteran returned to Jamestown College, doubling up on courses in order to graduate with a degree in political science and social studies within a year. Graduating in 1947, he and Jean Robertson, whom he had met at college, were married. A registered nurse, she planned to work to help support Vernon during law school.
Pearson applied to a number of law schools and chose the University of Michigan. Jean and Vernon had a son, Robert, after Vernon’s first year in law school. Jean, who had worked as a nurse at the University of Michigan hospital, resigned to care for their new son while Vernon took a half-time job at the law library. Because he had no spare time from his studies and work, the future judge declined an offer to join the prestigious law review staff. As a research assistant in his third year, he assisted a law professor, John Dawson, in writing a book on restitution and remedies. The dean of the University of Washington School of Law asked Dawson, an old classmate, to recommend a graduating law student to design and teach a new course in legal writing and research at Washington. Dawson chose Pearson, and within a few weeks the dean made an offer. Although Jean wanted to stay in the Midwest, the new opportunity and glowing reports of the region from Vernon’s brother Claude, who practiced law in Tacoma, convinced the Pearsons to move to the Northwest in 1950.
After a year, Pearson realized he needed practical experience to effectively teach. He resigned from the university and began working as regional attorney for the Office of Price Stabilization in Seattle under the supervision of former state supreme court judge, William Steinert. His brother’s law firm in Tacoma then offered him a position late in 1952 and Pearson joined, remaining in general practice with his brother for seventeen years. While practicing law, he became involved in 1968 in the Pierce County struggle between the conservative and moderate wings of the Republican party, helping to turn back conservatives from leadership positions. This excursion into party politics constituted Pearson’s major, if not sole, partisan experience, but it established his Republican credentials.
A vacancy occurred on the Pierce County Superior Court in 1967. Pearson applied, and Governor Daniel Evans interviewed him for the position. The appointment went to someone else. The writing, research, and broad social issues involved in appellate work prompted Pearson, in 1969, to apply for a spot on the newly established court of appeals. This time Governor Evans selected him for one of the three judgeships in division two, located in Tacoma. Pearson served twelve years on the intermediate appeals bench, and was twice chief judge of division two and presiding judge of the entire court of appeals in 1979. As presiding judge he helped establish better communication among the three divisions and instituted settlement conferences to help eliminate the growing backlog of cases. Several of his opinions subsequently came to be included in law school casebooks.
Pearson’s appointment to the supreme court came as a result of being in the right place at the right time. Justice Floyd Hicks of Tacoma had been on the court for five years but, with eyes weakened by cataracts, began finding it difficult to read the voluminous briefs and opinions and conduct legal research. When a vacancy on the Pierce County Superior Court appeared, he asked Republican Governor John Spellman to appoint him to that trial bench, with its less rigorous reading requirements. Hearing of the pending switch in assignments, Judge Pearson wrote the governor indicating his interest in Hicks’s position:
I had something geographically in common with [Hicks]. I also pointed out to him that none of the appointments to the supreme court had ever come from Division Two of the court of appeals… I kind of indicated… that [Division One in Seattle] didn’t have a corner on the talent. I sent a copy of my letter also to the state bar screening committee.
Spellman interviewed several candidates, including Pearson, who came strongly endorsed by the state bar committee. Spellman offered the position and Pearson accepted, taking the oath of office on January 18, 1982. He ran unopposed in the September 1982 primary elections and, again, in 1988.
Justice Pearson’s record on the high bench was that of a moderate-to-liberal judge supportive of the state’s Declaration of Rights, especially as applied to privacy issues. Between 1982 and 1984 he often provided the swing vote between the more conservative and liberal justices in a number of cases. From his position between the two wings of the court, Pearson quickly assumed a leadership position on the bench. Between 1982 and 1984 he wrote only fifty-six opinions, but on average, garnered more votes for those opinions than any of his colleagues. When he wrote an opinion he received an average of seventy-nine percent agreement from colleagues. Between 1984 and 1989, with the election and appointment of conservative justices, Pearson was found more often among the remaining liberals of the bench.
An explanation for Justice Pearson’s effectiveness can be found in his use of dissents. He had the lowest dissent rate of all members of the bench and when he dissented he had good reasons:
If you are careless with dissents, they don’t mean anything. I don’t write a dissent just to get something out … I write a dissent to persuade a majority of the court. Unless it’s a basic philosophical disagreement I won’t write a dissent … Dissent to me should be saved for those things that matter and those things in which you have a real stake and have a chance to change.
Pearson did not vigorously consult or lobby the other justices, although he admitted listening to suggestions others submitted. He tended to agree with Justice William Williams more often than with his other colleagues, and disagreed most with Justice Fred Dore. However, those disagreements never went beyond the conference room. Remarks at the time of his ascendency to the chief justice’s chair in 1987 indicated his concern for congeniality and compromise on the bench, which enhanced his position of leadership.
Justice Barbara Durham, with whom Pearson often disagreed, anticipated his conciliatory role. She believed he would “be a great healer on the court. He’s the perfect chief because he’ll bring us all together. He’s got that kind of good spirit about him.” The chiefs approach was indeed calculated to create the “good spirit.” According to Pearson, “If you want to be effective on the Court you have to be collegial. You have to be able to work with people.”
During his tenure as chief, Pearson found himself and the court in a unique situation. The temple of justice had to be vacated in order to work on it to help protect it from possible earthquake damage. Justice James Dolliver had suggested a “visiting court” system before, and the new chief justice implemented the plan. Although the highway and licenses building provided temporary quarters, the court traveled about the state, holding hearings at law schools, colleges and universities, high schools, and various courtrooms. Given Pearson’s concern that justices keep in touch with people, the visiting court experience fit well into his goals as chief. He cites his successes with increasing judicial salaries, securing a new pension system for judges, automating court records, and better coordination among the state courts as some of his accomplishments as chief.
The Pearsons had four children: Robert, Katherine, Stephen, and David. The justice served on the Tacoma School Board, State Board of Education, and Mt. Rainier Council of the Boy Scouts, and presided over the Northwest Tacoma Kiwanis Club and Tacoma Little Theatre.
As judge, Pearson also served as adjunct professor at the University of Puget Sound Law School, teaching one course a year on professional ethics. He chaired the Washington Judicial Council and the American Bar Association’s task force on the reduction of litigation cost and delay.
In his last few months as chief justice, Pearson urged reforms in the selection process for state judges. As a result of a controversy surrounding the Judicial Conduct Commission’s investigation of a superior court judge in Seattle, Pearson received a unanimous vote from the state Board of Judicial Administration to form a Commission on Washington Courts to determine how to “maintain and attract a quality judiciary.”
In February 1989 the American Judicature Society honored Vernon Pearson with its coveted Herbert Harley Award in recognition of the improvements he made to the Washington judicial system as chief justice. In May, Gonzaga University bestowed its Law Medal award on the justice in recognition of his contributions to the field of law.
But the traditional roles of holding the court together, supervising its many programs, and acting as its spokesperson, coupled with the various court reform activities, and the controversy surrounding the Judicial Conduct Commission, took their toll. I n July 1989, Pearson announced his resignation from the high bench:
I … felt burnout after two years as chief justice. Had I had a three month sabbatical, I might not have done this. But I need to get away for a while. When it stops being fun and a challenge, you need to depart. It has gotten harder and harder to spend those weekends reading briefs and doing the work that needs to be done to be effective. And I don’t want to serve on the court just for the prestige of the position.
Retirement for the sixty-six year old jurist did not mean giving up his concern for the administration of justice. He continued to hold two national chairmanships: the ABA task force on reduction of litigation cost and delay, and a Council of Chief Justice’s coordinating committee on jurisdictional disputes between state courts and Indian tribes. He was instrumental in organizing a national conference of state supreme court justices and court officials from around the United States and representatives of some of the nation’s 150 tribal courts. Mutual problems, understanding differences, and emphasizing Native American sovereignty were the subjects of discussion at the landmark conference. Despite an active retirement, Justice Pearson found more time for family, golf, and travel.
Selected References
Pearson’s oral history interview is in the supreme court collection, Washington State Archives. Also see Daily Journal of Commerce, 24 Feb. 1989; Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 23 Dec. 1981, 30 Aug. 1988, and 27 Jy. 1989; Spokane Spokesman-Review, 12 Jan. 1987; Washington State Bar News, 17 Apr. 1971, pp. 11-12, 29; Seattle Times/Post-Intelligencer, 11 Jan. 1987; Seattle-King County Bar Bulletin (May 1988) and (Apr. 1989); Bellevue Journal American, 22 Oct. 1988; and Aberdeen Daily World, 19 Jan. 1991.
The preceding biography is from Charles Sheldon's The Washington High Bench: A Biographical History of the State Supreme Court, 1889-1991, © 1992 by the Board of Regents of Washington State University. Reprinted here with permission and licensed to the public under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License by The Temple of Justice Project.
