The descendants of a California Supreme Court justice can sue the University of California for taking his name off its law school in San Francisco, according to a June 5 ruling by the California Court of Appeal. His name was removed based on dubious recent claims that he was involved in atrocities against Native Americans.
The descendants of Serranus Hastings, a 19th Century California Supreme Court justice, filed a lawsuit last year to stop the renaming of the University of California Hastings College of the Law after California’s governor signed legislation last fall to rename the law school. If the law school is allowed to be renamed, then Hastings’ descendants want their ancestor’s money paid back, with interest.
Lawyers for the law school tried to get a trial judge to dismiss the lawsuit, making the strange argument that it violated the state’s anti-SLAPP law, but the trial judge rejected that argument, and the appeals court affirmed his decision. “The decision by the California Court of Appeal for the First District in San Francisco allows the case to proceed at the trial court level,” Reuters reported.
The name change will cost millions of dollars to implement (including on taxpayer-funded maps) and also removed the hereditary board seat for the law school that belonged to the Hastings’ family, which it received in exchange for the initial $100,000, paid in gold coins in 1878, given by Hastings to fund it. The value today would be over $3 million, according to a conservative calculation using a low interest rate.
“Hastings was a California Supreme Court justice whose financial support established the law school,” Reuters notes. But recently, some historians have claimed he “orchestrated killings of Native Americans in order to remove them from ranch land he purchased in Northern California.”
Hastings’ descendants say that is a falsehood that defamed their illustrious ancestor. In their court complaint, they stated, “Beginning in 2017, critics claimed in a couple of poorly sourced opinion pieces that S.C. Hastings fomented and financed raids by State-run militia on Native Americans in the late 1850’s and early 1860’s and that the College should therefore consider changing its name. Although there is no known evidence that S.C. Hastings desired, requested, or knowingly encouraged any atrocities against Native Americans, the accusations against S.C. Hastings soon snowballed.”
