by Justice William W. Bedsworth

This is what it said in my newspaper this morning about a case decided yesterday: “Writing for the panel, Acting Presiding Justice William W. Bedsworth said the statute ‘addresses election integrity by safeguarding the right of citizens to vote against unnecessary interference by municipalities.’”

Imagine my surprise. I retired over a year ago.

And I have no recollection of going back on the bench to write that sentence. Worse yet, I have no paycheck to reflect my participation on that panel. They stopped paying me last November.

That seemed fair at the time. Cessation of paychecks was something I was prepared to accept as a function of retirement. I was resigned to the fact that my receipt of monthly emoluments from the State of California was not based simply on me being a good guy,¹ and was going to stop when I stopped showing up for work.

But if you’d told me I was going to be mailing in opinions a year after retirement, I think I would have held out for some kind of compensation. I should at least have gotten a free subscription to the Daily Journal, which published the sentence above.

I can understand their confusion. I was, after all, a phenomenally good worker. It appears I turned out so many opinions that I became the Daily Journal’s default button.

But I really need to discourage this. If my erstwhile colleagues conclude they can blame stuff on me, it could get to be problematic. I can easily imagine one of them deciding, “This isn’t the best opinion I’ve ever written. In fact, I think it’s pretty shaky. I’ll just attach Bedsworth’s name to it and send it around.”

So I want to be grain alcohol clear: I did not write that opinion. Nor did I drive Judge Crater into the woods, paint American Gothic, or sing Friends in Low Places.

I’ve done even less since retirement than I did before. If I’d been any less active, someone would have come by and pruned me.

Unless I get another paycheck from the state, this is a case of mistaken identity. In the immortal words of the great legal philosopher Collin Raye, “That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.”

Strangely enough, this is not the first time this kind of thing has happened to me. In 1987, midway into my first year on the bench, I went on vacation. Seemed like a good idea at the time.

Shortly after I left, a convicted murderer whom I had helped put behind bars, but who was now waiting for a retrial of the penalty phase of his first-degree conviction, filed a motion in the federal court. He complained that he had not received enough sleep in the Orange County jail, that he hadn’t been given enough time to eat, and that he had been deprived of his Playboy magazines.

We didn’t have a federal district court in Orange County in 1987.² The custom was for federal judges to borrow one of the courtrooms in our main courthouse when they had to hear something in Orange County.

So when the case was assigned to Federal District Judge William P. Gray, he needed a courtroom in which to hear it. And since I was out of town, they gave him mine.

I came back from vacation to find a stack of angry notes and letters on my desk—along with a couple copies of the Daily Pilot newspaper.³

It seems the reporter who covered the case for the Daily Pilot had seen my name above the door outside the courtroom and on the bench inside the courtroom and dutifully copied it down in his story. Which is how I returned to a front-page newspaper article headlining that Judge William W. Bedsworth had awarded a convicted murderer something over five thousand dollars because his Playboy magazines had been taken away by the jail.

I was an elected judge. I had been elected less than a year before, in large measure I suspect because I had the endorsement of every law enforcement agency in what was then an overwhelmingly conservative county.⁴ You can imagine how the Playboy magazine story played to my law enforcement constituency.

I spent days returning calls, responding to letters, trying to stop the bleeding. It wasn’t easy. One of the angriest letter-writers was the chief of police of one of our larger cities. And he refused to take my calls.

I finally had to leave a message with his secretary,⁵ saying I was going to take a day off and sit in his office all day telling everyone who walked by what a jerk he was if he didn’t call me. That did the trick, but it was not easy calming him down when he called. I also demanded a retraction from the newspaper. They were appropriately apologetic and promised an immediate retraction.

Which they provided. Their retraction of the front-page story that had run the previous week was one-column-inch long buried on page twelve. It essentially said they had made a mistake last week and reported a decision by Judge William Gray had been made by Judge William Bedsworth.

Not exactly “Stop the Presses!” stuff. Of the eleven people who read the retraction, maybe four tried to remember what it was about. You will never convince me that anyone who read it changed their opinion about Bedsworth The Playboy Guy.

Mark Twain famously said, “Never get into an argument with someone who buys their ink by the barrel.” Bedsworth’s corollary to this law is, “Never get into an argument with someone who decides how much space a story gets in the newspaper.”

All in all, though, I figure I’m doing okay on “ghost-written” decisions. I will gladly accept credit for the Court of Appeal’s decision in People of the State of California v. City of Huntington Beach. And I walked away from Judge Gray’s decision without visible scarring.⁶

But there still remains the question of compensation. My name showed up in the Daily Journal in connection with a case I had nothing to do with.

I consider it a flattering reference so I’m gonna have a hard time making a libel case out of it. I don’t think “they made me look good after I retired” is a very compelling enumeration of damages.

But I’ve been spending a lot of time reading sports pages since I retired. And I’ve learned about Name, Image and Likeness rights (NIL‘s).

I will not yet claim to be an expert in this area of the law, but it’s pretty clear to me that if college quarterbacks are making $2 million a year for showing up in the sports pages of the Times and Register—regardless of whether the reportage is of a four-touchdown game or three fumbles—I should be getting something for showing up in the front section of the DJ.

Last year the star quarterback at BYU walked away after four games because the million dollars he said the school promised him had not been forthcoming. I can’t throw a decent spiral anymore⁷ but I’m apparently one helluva journalistic default button. That should be good for something.

Daily Journal, don’t make me call a lawyer.

BEDS NOTES

1. Although, let’s face it: I should have gotten some kind of bonus for that.
2. The state was reluctant to establish a court here until we had rooted out the last remaining pterodactyls.
3. Then an independent daily, much beloved by the pterodactyls.
4. Save one. The Tustin Police Department hedged their bets and endorsed neither candidate in my race. So they’ve been the only law enforcement agency in Orange County who, for the last thirty-eight years, has been able to say, “Don’t blame us, we didn’t endorse him.”
5. We had secretaries in 1987. Gone with the pterodactyls. Replaced by assistants.
6. Although that police chief may have damaged one of my eardrums.
7. Truth be told, I never could, but it’s easier on my ego to make it sound age-related.

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.