Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Page 1
Judge Michael Mink Slates Retirement for Next Year
By a MetNews Staff Writer
Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Michael Mink told the MetNews yesterday he plans to retire around March 1 of next year.
“I decided it was time,” the 67-year-old jurist said, noting he will have served 16 years on the bench.
He was named to the Los Angeles Municipal Court in 1994 by then-Gov. Pete Wilson and sat in the Van Nuys and Hollywood branches hearing misdemeanors. Following court unification in 2000, he was assigned to Burbank and spent three years in family law before moving to a general civil calendar.
“I’ll miss being a judge,” he said, adding that “Burbank is a great place” to work. But he said there are other things he wants to do, including travel, play golf, visit more often with his children and grandchildren, and spend more time at his desert home in Shadow Hills.
He may sit on assignment, he said, preferably in civil or misdemeanor court, but “it’ll be nice just to be able to go,” mentioning Oregon and Montana as among the destinations he has wanted to visit.
Mink is a native of Rochester, N.Y., and graduated from public schools in the suburb of Brighton before going on to Syracuse University. His future wife had moved to Southern California with her family, so he moved as well and enrolled at USC Law School, which his son now attends.
Following bar admission in 1968, he worked for a year as a research attorney for the Fourth District Court of Appeal, then joined the Century City firm of Valensi & Rose, where he became a partner. He left in 1975 to open a solo practice in the San Fernando Valley, and eventually joined forces with Lee Alpert to form a firm that became Alpert, Mink & Barr before Mink left to become a judge.
He was a delegate to the State Bar Conference of Delegates from 1986 through 1988, representing the San Fernando Valley Bar Association, served on the board of the San Fernando Valley Neighborhood Legal Services Corp. from 1987 to 1991, and chaired the Superior Court’s Long Range Planning Committee for the valley from 1989 to 1993.
Aside from his legal and judicial work, he is a former president of the International Guiding Eyes Foundation and has been an advisor to San Fernando Valley Friends of Homeless Women and Children; a director of the San Fernando Valley Apartment Association and Valley Cable Television Inc.; and president of the Sherman Oaks Northern Little League, in which he also coached.
Copyright 2009, Metropolitan News Company