Jerry Brown’s excellent adventure

Earlier this week Jerry Brown vetoed a bill that would have required applicants to the California bar to complete 50 hours of supervised pro bono work (supervised by a lawyer or law professor) before they could be eligible for bar admission. In his veto message, Brown pointed out that California law students often pay exorbitant sums for degrees that don’t end in legal employment for them, and that it would make more sense to try to make legal education cheaper than to pile on yet more professional requirements onto aspiring lawyers. (Here’s an explanation of why mandatory pro bono for aspiring lawyers is a terrible idea).

Reading Brown’s message reminded me of a couple of things:

(1) Jerry Brown is governor of California; and, relatedly,

(2) His amazing political comeback — he was first elected governor of the nation’s largest state three months after Richard Nixon resigned the presidency — has gotten practically no attention in the national media.

Brown has had one of the most remarkable careers in American political history. It’s a unique and fascinating story in many ways, and I hope somebody writes a good book about it if they haven’t already.