Charles S. Burnell (September 21, 1874 – June 23, 1949) served 21 years as a judge in Los Angeles County, California, presiding over trials that sometimes involved Hollywood motion-picture personalities. Several opinions from higher courts castigated or chastised Burnell for his activities or statements in court.
Personal.
Burnell was born on September 21, 1874, in Elko, Nevada, to S. M. and Anna Smith; as an infant he was adopted by his stepfather, Martin Burnell. He was brought to California when he was a year old. He was educated in private schools in Sonoma County, California, and graduated from Lowell High School in San Francisco. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree in the first graduating class of Stanford University in 1895. He earned a master of arts from Stanford in 1896, and he was later given an honorary doctor of laws degree from Loyola University in Los Angeles.
Burnell and Blanche Iola Emery were married in 1907, and they had a daughter, Dorothy. In 1934, Blanche was granted a divorce in Los Angeles on the grounds of desertion after a decree had been refused in Reno, Nevada, in 1931. In 1936 he married Agnes Storey Smith in Sandpoint, Idaho, whom he had met while on a vacation in Alaska; he adopted her daughter, Beth.
He was a member of Palestine Masonic Lodge 351, the University Club (in Los Angeles), Stanford Club, Chaparral Club and the Hollywood Golf and Country Club.
Burnell, of 170 South Vista Street in the Fairfax neighborhood of Los Angeles, died in Sebastopol, California, on June 23, 1949, while on vacation in Sonoma County. His death was attributed to a heart attack. He was buried in Forest Lawn Memorial Park, Glendale, after an "unusually brief funeral service" in the Church of the Recessional that "consisted almost solely of a poem written by the judge himself," and was preceded by a "short eulogy" by Superior Judge Charles E. Haas, "a friend of Judge Burnell's for 55 years." Burnell had been known as the "poet laureate of the bench."
Vocation.
Burnell practiced law in San Francisco from 1896 until he resettled in Los Angeles in 1906. As an attorney, he drew attention when he filed a legal paper written entirely in verse. He was assistant city attorney between 1913 and 1918 when he became a special counsel for the Los Angeles County Flood Control District. In 1919 he was elected city attorney, serving for two years until he was chosen by voters for the Los Angeles County Superior Court.
From 1924 to 1932 he was a professor of constitutional law at Loyola University.
In July 1925 Burnell made news when he allowed attorneys and court officials (including himself) the right to remove their jackets during hot-weather days, and then he dashed off a poem to mark the event:
 ;poem ;
"Oh, why should judges stew and sweat,"
"As hot and hotter it doth get."
"Can they not justice fine dispense"
"Without such suffering intense?"
"Why should we not our coats remove—"
"Our sense of freedom to improve—"
"And show our shirts (if clean they be)"
"Without a loss of dignity?"
 ;/poem ;
Controversies and notable cases.
In 1948 three justices of the District Court of Appeal castigated Burnell for his "improper conduct," which the "Los Angeles Times" called "the latest of several directed at Judge Burnell by the high tribunal over the years." "For the first time, however," the "Times" added, "two of the Appeal Court justices made a point of outlining how the offending jurist might be removed from the bench." The two judges noted that the State Judicial Commission could retire a jurist "for reason of mental disability that is, or is like to become[,] of a permanent character" or that a two-thirds vote of each house of the Legislature could oust him.
Controversies and notable cases included:
you might ask the Mayor [ Fletcher Bowron ] to do it personally. I notice he is getting a little overweight and the exercise would do him good and take his mind off fighting with the City Council. Or you might ask the members of that body to do the job. I think they would all be better off, and so would the public if they were doing a little honest work instead of making damned fools of themselves . . . .
"Metropolitan News-Enterprise" series.
In April 2001 Roger M. Grace, a lawyer and columnist for the legal newspaper "Metropolitan News-Enterprise," wrote a three-piece series whose headlines called Burnell a "Judicial Tyrant of Many Years Past" and "A Barb-Spewing Jurist." Grace wrote that Burnell had been chastised by appellate courts or individual higher judges for his remarks and actions in court. Grace's text noted that:
A source of particular consternation to the bar and fellow judges for a three-decade period in the first half of the last century . . . . was . . . Charles S. Burnell. Near the end of his career, two justices in a Court of Appeal opinion called for his removal from the bench either by a judicial commission, based on mental disability, or by the Legislature through the impeachment process. . . . A string of smart-aleck statements by the judge [were] aimed at defense lawyers. . . . . [Burnell had] a propensity for popping off. . . . [He was] long in tenure, short of fuse. His oppressiveness and his continual in-court utterance of insults is immortalized in opinions contained in the Official Reports. . . . The gibes included an insinuation that the plaintiff's counsel was not much of a lawyer and a remark that a witness "took a nice little nap on the witness stand when he wasn't testifying."
References and notes.
 ;templatestyles src="Reflist/styles.css" / ;
 ;br ;
 ;br ;