Superior Court Jurist to Step Down : Legal system: After nearly 21 years as a county judge, Robert J. Soares announces his retirement.

Superior Court Judge Robert J. Soares said Thursday that he will retire in three weeks after nearly 21 years on the Ventura County bench.

“It was time to experience some of the pleasures we all look forward to after retirement,” said Soares, 59, who served 13 years as a Municipal Court judge and eight years on the Superior Court.

Reacting to the announcement, colleagues said Soares’ departure from the court Jan. 31 will leave a vacancy that will be difficult to fill.

“I’ve known him for years as an attorney and a judge,” Presiding Superior Court Judge Edwin M. Osborne said. “He’s a very hard, efficient worker. He is a bright and a learned judge. I wish I had another dozen like him, and I’ll miss him very much.”

Judge Lawrence Storch, presiding criminal judge of the Superior Court, called Soares “a very gifted, talented judge” who will be missed on the court.

“Several things distinguished his career on the Superior Court bench,” Storch said. “One thing is prodigious productivity. I mean, he does the work of two judges . . . He works long hours and he knows how to move a case along without sacrificing the litigants’ due process or right to a fair trial.”

Wendy Lascher, chairwoman of the Ventura County Bar Assn., agreed:

“He’s a very fair and hard-working judge,” she said. “People are worried about whether they’re going to be able to get their civil cases to trial with an absence on the bench. . . . They’re going to have a big gap there.”

Soares was born in Hanford, which is south of Fresno, and graduated from Santa Paula Union High School in 1949. After serving in the Army briefly in the mid-1950s, he attended the Boalt Hall School of Law at UC Berkeley, earning his law degree in 1958.

Soares worked as a deputy district attorney from 1958 to 1961 in the Ventura County district attorney’s office, then went into private practice.

In 1969, Gov. Ronald Reagan appointed him to the Municipal Court, where he was later elected in 1974 and reelected in 1980.

Soares, a Republican, was elected to the Superior Court bench in a four-way election in June, 1982, to fill a vacancy created by the retirement of Judge Jerome H. Berenson.

But just before joining the Superior Court bench, Soares received an uncommon request.

Democratic Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr. asked if he could appoint Soares to the Superior Court bench, thereby creating a vacancy on the Municipal Court bench, to which the governor could appoint then-Deputy Dist. Atty. Robert Bradley before leaving office.

Soares said he agreed to spare the court a three- to four-month vacancy that would occur until Gov. Deukmejian oriented himself to the appointment process, and because he approved of Bradley’s appointment.

Soares said with a chuckle, “I was a Brown appointee for about 10 hours,” which has made him the target of frequent ribbing by his Republican colleagues.

“We have never let him live that down,” Storch said.

On the Superior Court, Soares worked on both criminal and civil law, and cases of family law, juvenile dependency and juvenile delinquency until October, 1988. That month he was chosen as one of six judges assigned to reorganize the criminal division into a vertical case system, where each judge would follow a case from arraignment to conviction.

He was assigned to hear civil matters in July, 1990.

Soares said that in retirement he will have more time to sail off the Rincon and travel with his wife, first to visit their daughter in Massachusetts and then to tour China.