The legal profession has lost one of its most eloquent and learned members and Pacific Palisades has lost one of its oldest residents with the passing of Raoul D. Maga’a, who died of heart failure on January 16 at the age of 95. When he was four, Raoul came to California with his family from Coyoacan, Mexico during the Mexican revolution. The family settled in Berkeley, where Raoul attended UC Berkeley (Class of 1932) Boalt Hall School of Law. He was admitted to the California Bar Association in 1936 and continued in active practice (with a hiatus for service as an infantry private in the U.S. Army during World War II) for the next 64 years. He finally went on inactive status at the age of 90. Raoul was universally admired and respected by his colleagues, his opponents and the judiciary before whom he practiced, both for his abilities as a trial lawyer and his absolute, unwavering integrity. Among the many honors awarded him were a Fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers; a Fellow, President and Dean of the International Academy of Trial Lawyers; 1963 California Trial Lawyer of the Year and, most recently, induction into the first class of the Consumer Attorneys of Los Angeles Hall of Fame. Raoul wrote and edited a number of legal and medical texts, some of which remain in use today, including a four-volume work authored with his dear friend Leo Gelfand, M.D., J.D., for the Courtroom Medicine series entitled ‘The Low Back’ and numerous articles for the journal ‘Trauma’ of which he was also an editor. In 1951, Raoul and his wife Eugenie moved their family from Cheviot Hills to a house on Maroney Lane (near upper Las Pulgas) that had been built for screen actress Virginia Bruce, who would later become the first honorary mayor of Pacific Palisades. The Maga’as purchased the house from singer/actress Deanna Durbin. ‘When we first moved here our neighbors owned cattle and sheep, and mountain lions used to cross our backyard to get to them,’ said Raoul’s son Brian, who attended Marquez Elementary, Paul Revere Middle School and Palisades High and now lives in the Highlands. ‘In 1955, someone offered to sell my father 200 acres of land behind his house and he turned him down thinking they would never develop there,’ Brian remembered. ‘Two years later, the bulldozers showed up.’ Though he was raised in a Spanish-speaking household by parents who never fully mastered the English language, Raoul was a gifted and memorable speaker. Lawyers and judges now in their 60s and 70s still regularly recount talks given by him when they were in law school. Walter Ely, a Judge on the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, once described an argument that Raoul gave in a case as sounding ”like a cascade of honey flowin’ over a bed of rose petals.’ Raoul loved poetry, and up to the week he died he would recite passages from poems and plays he had not read since college. He was self-effacing, polite and incapable of sitting down if a lady was standing. Once, in New York, a woman dropped some change on the sidewalk and when he leaned down to pick it up and return it she stomped on his hand, assuming he was trying to steal it. Professor Bernard Witkin, author of the standard reference work on California law and procedure, told Raoul over dinner: ‘You and I are both professionally modest, but you have an ostentatious humility!’ Raoul is survived by Eugenie, his wife of 69 years; his sister Elsa Love; his daughters Danielle and Martine; his sons Carlos, Brian and Robert; and his numerous grandchildren, friends, acquaintances and admirers. He was preceded in death by his brother Ismaelito, his sister Isabel Scheville and his son Alexander. At Raoul’s direction, there will be no services. To those who knew him, please keep him in your hearts, your thoughts and your prayers.
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