Ninth Circuit Senior Judge Harry Pregerson Sr., a liberal icon who notably said that he'd follow his conscience over precedent during his confirmation hearing in 1979, died on Saturday, Nov. 25 at the age of 94.

Pregerson, who served on the court for nearly three decades, was part of a surge of leftward leaning jurists who joined the court after President Jimmy Carter and a Democratically controlled Congress nearly doubled the size of the court from 13 to 23 judges in 1978. Prior to his Ninth Circuit service, Pregerson served as a U.S. District Judge in the Central District of California for nearly a dozen years. During his judicial service, Pregerson, a U.S. Marine veteran who earned a Purple Heart for wounds suffered in the Battle of Okinawa, helped start four homeless shelters and a special psychological wing at the Veterans Affairs hospital in West Los Angeles, among other charitable ventures.

“I like being a judge because it gives me opportunities to help others and to do the right thing,” Pregerson told a reporter from The Recorder in a 2005 judicial profile.

That echoed an answer Pregerson gave Sen. Alan Simpson, a Wyoming Republican, during his Ninth Circuit confirmation hearing in October 1979. Simpson asked Pregerson what he would do if case law or a statute—interpreted according to legislative intent—required a decision that would offend Pregerson's conscience.

Said Pregerson: “Well, of course it's a hypothetical question and life does not present situations that are clear cut, but I think all of us, judges and lawyers, would be very pleased if congressional intent was clearly discernible. I have to be honest with you. If I was faced with a situation like that and it ran against my conscience, I would follow my conscience.”

When Simpson pressed him again, Pregerson replied: “I said, if I were faced with a situation like that, that ran against my conscience, disturbed my conscience, I would try and find a way to follow my conscience and do what I perceived to be right and just.”

Ninth Circuit colleague Alex Kozinski said in a phone interview Monday that most judges wouldn't feel comfortable taking Pregerson's approach to the law, but that he thinks the court has lost a valuable perspective with Pregerson's departure.

“He did not draw a line between the law and his conscience,” Kozinski said. “To him, law without conscience is a meaningless thing, or an evil thing.”

Pregerson's conscience-centric approach to jurisprudence was perhaps most notably on display after the U.S. Supreme Court in 2003 upheld California's “three strikes” law—which triggered harsh sentencing increases for offenders with two prior convictions. Pregerson, even then the oldest active member of the court, dissented from unpublished affirmances in a series of “three strikes” cases on remand from the nation's high court. Pregerson wrote in one typical dissent: “In good conscience, I cannot vote to go along with the sentence imposed in this case.”

Lara Bazelon, an associate professor of law and the director of the Criminal Juvenile Justice and Racial Justice Clinical Programs at the University of San Francisco School of Law, who also clerked for Pregerson, said the judge's approach was to “humanize everything.”

“It was always about the people,” Bazelon said. “It was never a cold record with him.”

Bazelon said that she and a co-clerk went to visit the judge at his home in Woodland Hills earlier this month when they heard about Pregerson's failing health.

“Emotionally and mentally he was exactly the same,” she said. Pregerson, she said, spent a long stretch of their visit recounting the life story of his caregiver. “That's exactly who he is. He took this intense personal interest in strangers.”

Kozinski concurred, saying that Pregerson was the type of person who had “never met a stranger.”

“He was your friend and he wanted to do something to help you,” Kozinski said. Kozinski added that Pregerson's own rigorous focus on fitness in his later years to keep up his mental acuity inspired him to lose weight and take better care of himself.

In an essay published in The Recorder, Ben Feuer of the California Appellate Law Group called Pregerson's decision to take senior status nearly two years ago an “epochal shift” for the court. On Monday Feuer said Pregerson's death is “certainly a moment for pause and reflection.”

“It's certainly an indicator that the Ninth Circuit is not the court that it was when it developed its reputation for being this ultra-liberal court,” Feuer said. “I think all the judges on the Ninth Circuit respected him even if they disagreed with every word that he wrote.”