Legendary Judge William Orrick of the Northern District of California died in his sleep Thursday night at the age of 87. He was both a great champion of civil rights, and an infamous curmudgeon:
The gravel-voiced jurist relished [his] reputation [as one of the more demanding judges in the Northern District]. "When someone comes [into my courtroom on a case] and hasn't done any work on it, when the other side has worked on it and I've worked on it for a long, long time, and he's out there having done nothing but charge his client these outrageous prices per hour for nothing, I dress him down, and I don't make any pretense about [] doing it," he said in a 1992 interview. "The result is I get very good argument in my court."
The Recorder has a fond and interesting obit here.
BTW, it was Judge Orrick's father who was the original "Orrick" in Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe. That's pretty amazing, considering that the original Orrick's son lived for 87 years, concluding only yesterday. Not many families have histories reaching back that far into California's legal past.