The US Supreme Court declined Monday to review the case brought by six descendants of Serranus Hastings and a group of alumni of the UC law school arguing that the state violated its own law in stripping the Hastings name from the school three years ago.
Around 170 years ago, Serranus Clinton Hastings prompted and organized state-sponsored, military-style Indian "hunting" expeditions in California, expeditions that led to the genocide of people in order to take their land from them — and it was this very land that led to Hastings's own fortune. This all was laid out in a Chronicle op-ed nearly a decade ago, which lead directly to a New York Times exposé on Hastings four years later, noting that California's first chief justice and the namesake of Kamala Harris's own alma mater was the mastermind of a genocide.
In multiple campaigns, at Hastings' behest, hundreds of members of the Yuki tribe in California's Round Valley, including children, were massacred, largely just so that Hastings and others could profit from the land. And in 1878, now a wealthy man, Hastings donated $100,000 in gold coins to establish the University of California school of law. The state of California established the school through legislation, saying that it would "forever" bear the name of Hastings.
But legislators wrote a new law repealing that one, which took effect in 2023, and since then, the school has been known (somewhat awkwardly) as UC Law San Francisco.
Six descendants of Hastings and a group of alumni attached to the name sued, arguing both that the name change was illegal, and that Hastings's original $100,000 endowment should be reimbursed to the descendants with interest — a total of $1.7 million.
A San Francisco court tried to toss this suit in 2024, this was appealed to the state court of appeals, which also ruled against the descendants, and then in February, an appeal to the California Supreme Court also failed, with the state's high court letting the earlier ruling by the First District Court of Appeal stand.
The descendants tried to take their case to the Supreme Court, but the justices issued an unsigned decision declining review on Monday, as the Chronicle reports, with no noted dissents.
And, so, the 148-year-old law school shall remain UC Law San Francisco, no more Hastings.
A spokesperson for the appellants gave a statement to the Chronicle, saying the high court's decision was disappointing, and "This litigation sought to vindicate fundamental constitutional principles and preserve the legacy of Judge Hastings against legislative action we believe exceeded constitutional limits."
As scholar and UC Law professor John Briscoe wrote in his 2017 Chronicle op-ed, "A college at Yale no longer bears the name of John C. Calhoun, in response to increasingly vocal outrage that Calhoun owned slaves and, perhaps worse, was an ardent and eloquent proponent of slavery." And, he added, "The University of San Francisco just renamed its Phelan Hall, originally named for a former San Francisco mayor who railed against Chinese immigrants and whose campaign slogan was 'Keep California white.'... where, in relation to slavery and racism, might we place genocide?"
