Tuesday, January 4, 2005
Page 1
Three Superior Court Judges to Retire in Upcoming Weeks
By a MetNews Staff Writer
Three Los Angeles Superior Court judges will retire in upcoming weeks, the MetNews has learned.
Judge Dean Farrar, who has spent his entire judicial career in Compton, has been on vacation since Dec. 17 and the court is awaiting an official retirement date, a spokesperson said. Judge C. Robert Simpson Jr. will step down Feb. 18, and Judge David Perkins on a February date to be determined, the spokesperson added.
The three join Judge Thomas Stoever, whose previously announced departure is effective Feb. 14.
Farrar, who will turn 70 Feb. 13, was appointed by then-Gov. Jerry Brown to the Compton Municipal Court in 1980. He became a Superior Court judge through unification five years ago.
An Illinois native, he went to work for Trans World Airlines in Chicago in 1953, later transferring to Los Angeles. He spent 19 years with the now-defunct company as a cargo agent and red cap, continuing to work while and after attending Southwestern University School of Law, from which he graduated in 1970.
After admission to the State Bar, he moved to the company’s labor relations department in New York, returning to Los Angeles in 1974 to open a Compton firm where he practiced family and criminal law and did general civil work until his appointment as a Compton Municipal Court commissioner in 1979.
Simpson, 79, currently sits in Norwalk. He was named to the Superior Court by then-Gov. George Deukmejian in 1988 after serving as chief of the Division of Labor Standards Enforcement and later as chief deputy director of the Department of Industrial Relations. He was twice unopposed for re-election and easily beat back a 2002 challenge from a candidate who questioned whether Simpson, who will turn 80 before he retires, should still be sitting on the bench as his age.
A North Dakota native who spent much of his youth in Bakersfield, Simpson graduated from Missouri Valley College in 1946 and from Cornell University Law School in 1950. His legal career began as an associate at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher before he joined Southern California Edison Company as house counsel in 1953.
He moved into corporate management at Edison in 1960 and spent another 20 years with the company before opening a solo practice in Orange, focusing on labor and employment law. That practice lasted until 1983, when he joined the Deukmejian administration.
A longtime Republican Party activist, he was also a school board member in Whittier from 1976 to 1983.
Perkins, 69, was elected to the Downey Municipal Court in 1990 and became a Superior Court judge through unification in 2000. A graduate of USC and Western State University College of Law in Fullerton, he was a Downey sole practitioner before his election to the bench.
Copyright 2005, Metropolitan News Company