June 2026 A Criminal Waste of Space - Problem Solved

by Justice William W. Bedsworth

The San Diego Padres are a professional baseball team located in . . . wait for it . . . San Diego. They are in indirect competition with our own baseball team, the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim.

You don’t want to get me started on the civic abomination that Angel team name represents. If you are not a baseball fan and therefore blissfully unaware of the fact the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim have as much connection with Los Angeles as the City of Santa Ana has with the San Diego Zoo, thank your lucky stars. This is one bit of idiocy you’ve been spared.

The San Diego Padres used to share their city with the San Diego Chargers football team, which lived in San Diego from 1961 to 2016. Before and after that, they were the Los Angeles Chargers, reflecting where they played their games.¹ The Chargers move up and down the coast like some kind of bizarre athletic Halley’s comet. They should be showing up in San Diego again by the time you’re my age. They do this for the same reason the Angels masquerade as a Los Angeles team: their owners thought it would be more lucrative.

I mention all this because I’ve decided today is a good day to solve the problem of court funding. California hasn’t had enough money to fund its court system adequately in my lifetime. I feel it’s my civic duty to solve this problem now that I’m retired and have a little time on my hands. And the model of professional sports seems like a good one.

It seems like it’s a good model because it’s run by a bunch of billionaires whose investment in millionaire ballplayers has turned out really well. As I write this, the San Diego Padres owner is selling them for 3.9 billion dollars.

That’s billionaires with a capital “B” and that rhymes with “C” and that stands for cash.² People who can pay athletes 700 million dollars to play baseball for ten years³ and turn that into a CASH BONANZA are people worth following around for awhile.

So let’s analyze how they’re doing this. Part of it is advertising for television of course. Television dictates when the seasons begin and end, what time the games are played, and what rules are followed.⁴ The courts can’t rely on television rights. Probate hearings and settlement conferences rarely involve bats and balls. We can’t really appeal to the inexplicably passionate devotion of modern Americans to watching others chase balls.⁵

But another thing the billionaire sports owners do is sell naming rights to their ballparks. The Anaheim Ducks hockey team used to play at the Arrowhead Pond. Now that stadium is the Honda Center. Same building, different highest bidder. And the bidding starts at ten digits.

The Los Angeles Rams and Los Angeles Chargers play at SoFi Stadium. Next year it could be the Gazorninplat Mayonnaise Center.⁶ Large corporations pay a ton of money to have the rest of us refer to sports venues and events by their name. That’s the model the courts should be following.

We start by renaming our court buildings. North Court becomes the Netflix Justice Center, under a ten-year contract with Netflix, renewable only if they are again the highest bidder.

West Court will be the Boot Barn John Wayne⁷ Justice Center. It is, after all, WEST Court.

Harbor Court becomes Hobie Justice Center and Surfing Museum. We repurpose one courtroom into an admission-priced attraction, thus picking up even more cash.

Santa Ana is the flagship of the system. Those naming rights have to sell for more. I figure Gross National Product numbers for this. Maybe Argentina or Slovenia. Or, given our country’s recent detente with Russia, I think the Vladimir Putin Justice Center would bring in a few truckloads of gold.⁸

The Betty Lou Lamoreaux Center presents a different problem. It already has a name. A real name. The name of a person many of us remember.

But this can be overcome. My law school alma mater plays basketball on the Pete Newell Court at Haas Pavilion. When they built a new locker room/weight room in the football stadium, they called it the Simpson Center⁹ for Student-Athlete High Performance. There’s always a way to get another name or two onto a facility.¹⁰

There are eight gates into Lambeau Field, home of the Green Bay Packers. They are named for Bellin Health, Miller Brewing, American Family Insurance, the Oneida Tribe of Native Americans of Wisconsin, Fleet Farm stores, Associated Bank, Kwik Trip, and Invisalign. Miller Brewing additionally sponsors seats in one part of one end zone, and an atrium area. We need more doors on our courthouses. And maybe end zone seating.

Even the Los Angeles Dodgers have doubled up on naming. They’ve committed the sacrilege of selling the naming rights at hallowed Dodger Stadium, a cathedral in a sport full of churches. They now play on Uniqlo¹¹ Field at Dodger Stadium. More money.

So we sell the Disney Department One¹² at the Betty Lou Lamoreaux Justice Center. Which, of course, opens up the chance for naming rights for all the other courtrooms in the county. We’ll be rolling in dough!

I know this will take some getting used to. We’re going to have to adjust to saying, “I have two appearances tomorrow: I’m in the Frito-Lay Courtroom at the Reese’s Pieces Justice Center, and then in the afternoon I have to be at Fridley Waste Control Courtroom at Banana Republic Justice Center.” But it’s worth it if we can hire new judges and pay San Francisco’s public defenders.¹³

And it’s not even all that revolutionary. If you appear in the Second District, Division 6 Court of Appeal in Ventura, your hearing will be in the Arthur Gilbert Courtroom, named after my friend Art Gilbert, the “poet laureate” of the appellate courts.

And the federal courts have apparently long since understood that you can append several names to one building. Take another look at the photograph that illustrates the beginning of this column. I took that last week in San Diego. The John Rhoades Federal Judicial Center manages to honor not only John Rhoades, but FOUR other honorees who have their name appended to a federal courthouse there.

I have no idea who those people were. I hope they donated as much for naming rights as the Petco pet supplies people did for the Padres’ Petco Park a few blocks away. The point is there’s both federal and state precedent, and equally important, it’s something people are already used to.

Problem solved. You’re welcome.

Stay tuned for next month’s Pillsbury Eat or Bake Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough A Criminal Waste of Space.

BEDS NOTES

1. Unlike that heinous Angels moniker, which is insulting and deceitful and does not reflect the city where the team plays. See, I told you not to get me started on that.
2. Apologies to Professor Harold Hill, and his great rendition of “Ya Got Trouble [Right here in River City]” in The Music Man.
3. Shohei Ohtani’s Dodger contract. I am not making this up.
4. Baseball changed its extra-inning rules when the games got too long for TV.
5. Even my dogs—who loved chasing balls—have had no interest in watching balls chased.
6. Duke’s Mayonnaise sponsors the Duke’s Mayo Bowl college football game every year. The winning coach has a vat of mayonnaise dumped over his head. Honest.
7. In this county, you never miss a chance to invoke The Duke.
8. This is not a political comment. Merely recognition of the opening of a recently re-opened market. We can’t let principle get in the way of money, can we?
9. My research indicates the donor family was probably not THE Simpsons, but hey, it’s Berkeley, who knows?
10. When my undergraduate alma mater proposed selling naming rights on the baseball batting cage, my teammates wanted to get together a fund to name it “The Bill Bedsworth Batting Cage” to honor my role as the worst hitter in the history of NCAA baseball.
11. Google it.
12. Disney’s like John Wayne here. If it’s Orange County, you gotta get Disney involved.
13. Another crisis you may not be aware of.

William W. Bedsworth was an Associate Justice of the California Court of Appeal until his retirement in October 2024. He's written this column for over forty years, largely just to get it out of his system. A Criminal Waste of Space won Best Column in California in 2019 from the California Newspaper Publishers Association (CNPA). His last book, Lawyers, Gubs, and Monkeys, can be obtained through Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Vandeplas Publishing. He can be contacted at heybeds@outlook.com.