82-Year-Old Jurist Bows Out Reluctantly

The hazards of family law loom large in Abe Gorenfeld’s memory after 26 years as a Superior Court commissioner.

There was the time a disputing couple stepped out of his courtroom and the husband pulled out a knife and stabbed his wife.

And if his memory grows fuzzy, there is always the physical evidence, such as the bullet hole still visible in the ceiling outside his fifth-floor courtroom where a woman fired her pistol at her soon-to-be ex-husband and missed.

But despite the rigors of doling out justice during divorce proceedings, child custody battles and alimony wars, the 82-year-old jurist says he will miss it.

After working in the Torrance courthouse for more than two decades, Gorenfeld has gathered up the haphazard piles of papers, the stacks of legal books and bundles of personal knickknacks and reluctantly decided to retire.

“It was my plan to keep working as long as I was physically or intellectually able to do it, but somebody had other plans,” said Gorenfeld, sitting in his now spartan office on his last day of work last week.

Though no one around the courthouse wants to talk publicly about it, the octogenarian Gorenfeld said he believes he is being forced out because of his age.

For more than two decades he has driven the 12 miles from his Rancho Palos Verdes home to the Torrance courthouse to do a job that some say should qualify him for combat pay.

But right before Thanksgiving, Gorenfeld was told that on Jan. 2 he would be transferred to the Norwalk courthouse, a 60-mile round-trip from his home that is difficult for Gorenfeld to make. He wears trifocal glasses, has limited night vision and is still recuperating from prostate cancer surgery.

In a letter to Robert Parkin, the presiding judge of the Los Angeles Superior Court who ordered the transfer, Gorenfeld said it would be a hardship to work so far from home. Parkin wrote back that the transfer would stand.

Parkin, in an interview, said he would not discuss personnel matters.

Stephen O’Neil, supervising judge for the Torrance courthouse, said he had nothing to do with the transfer and that Gorenfeld was doing a fine job. “He put in his wish list of Torrance, Long Beach and Norwalk for 1997 assignments. He got one of the three assignments,” O’Neil said.

Gorenfeld had considered filing an age discrimination lawsuit to protest the new assignment. But his wife, Virginia, convinced him not to.

“She said, ‘You don’t need all that nonsense. Let’s walk quietly into the sunset,’ ” he said.

Whether he will walk quietly or not is another matter. It’s not in the white-haired jurist’s nature.

Before becoming a commissioner in 1970, Gorenfeld was a liberal-leaning lawyer who championed free speech, unions and equal treatment for all races.

He graduated second in his class in 1937 from the USC School of Law. It was at USC where he first defended the rights of African Americans when a professor made a disparaging remark about blacks during a lecture. Gorenfeld led several students who complained to the instructor.

After finishing school, he opened a law office in Los Angeles where he did pro bono work for the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People.

In the 1930s, he tried to unionize the multicultural mix of migrant workers who toiled in the farms that dotted the South Bay area. But he found that the ethnic and racial differences among the Filipino, Mexican and Japanese workers divided them more than their mutual needs could unite them.

After World War II, he found himself in the middle of one of Los Angeles’ hottest debates. A Nazi sympathizer named Gerald L.K. Smith had applied for a permit to use the auditorium at a local high school for an assembly. The Los Angeles Board of Education turned him down.

Gorenfeld called the case “a real test” of his belief in civil liberties. Despite disagreeing with Smith’s beliefs, the attorney supported the man’s right to speak. Gorenfeld won a court order that permitted the Nazi sympathizer to hold the assembly.

Then he stood outside the school and picketed the event when Smith spoke.

As much as Gorenfeld loved championing liberal causes, he tired of trying to run a lucrative law practice. In 1970, the judges of the Los Angeles Superior Court gave him a job as a commissioner.

His years as a lawyer served him well. Judges in Torrance called Gorenfeld one of the best legal minds in the courthouse, even though he never received an appointment to a Superior Court judgeship.

A commissioner has many of the powers of a judge but earns 85% of a judge’s salary. Instead of being appointed by the governor or elected by voters, a commissioner is selected and appointed by the judges he works for. Commissioners can listen to almost any case a judge hears in civil or criminal court.

In Torrance Superior Court, the two commissioners listen primarily to family law cases and law and motion matters.

“I always thought he tried to be fair and equitable,” said family law attorney Jim Bohan, who argued cases in Gorenfeld’s courtroom. “Sometimes in the profession I’m in, that is impossible. And in being fair and equitable, you sometimes make enemies.”

Gorenfeld made quite a few enemies in the late 1980s when he suggested in a legal newspaper that the state’s family law system should be restructured by taking divorces out of the courts and appointing mediators to resolve issues ranging from dividing community property to alimony and child support.

To prove his point, Gorenfeld cites a child custody case he handled in which $280,000 was spent on legal fees to determine which parent should get custody of two teenage children. The case went to the California Supreme Court before again ending up in Gorenfeld’s courtroom. “I could have resolved the matter in two hours without all that expense just by talking to the kids,” he said.

The idea of divorce mediation, however, never impressed family law attorneys. “I thought he oversimplified a very complex and sensitive area,” said Joseph Taback, a family law attorney in Century City who opposed Gorenfeld’s proposal. “But I think he was well meaning.”

Now that he is officially retired, Gorenfeld will not be too far from the law. He plans to write about the problems he sees in the judicial system. He hopes to resurrect his idea of taking divorce out of the courts. And then he intends to volunteer his legal services to women involved in domestic violence matters.