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Justice Brown defended. Quotable:

Brown writes with a flair that can delight laymen and law students while disgruntling stodgier observers. In her San Remo dissent, she turned the full rhetorical force on the power-tripping bureaucrats in the City by the Bay:

"Private property, already an endangered species in California, is now entirely extinct in San Francisco," she observed. The City had become a "neo-feudal regime." She reprimanded fellow jurists who automatically give a pass to confiscatory land-use restrictions. "Once again a majority of this court has proved that 'if enough people get together and act in concert, they can take something and not pay for it.' But theft is theft. Theft is theft even when the government approves of the thievery."

In one of the few uses of the word, ever, in the history of American case law, Brown called San Francisco a "kleptocracy." She excoriated the city's refusal to acknowledge that "the free use of private property is just as important as ... speech, the press, or the free exercise of religion."

Brown's judicial philosophy amounts to what is sometimes called the "Madisonian" view, because it reflects the allegiance to higher law and transcendent rights embraced by the "Father of the Constitution." Not everything is open to majority rule, and courts must ensure that the majority does not run roughshod over groups that are unpopular or lack political power. As Brown put it in another dissenting opinion, "Courts must be especially vigilant, must vigorously resist encroachments that heighten the potential for arbitrary government action."