Loren Miller (January 20, 1903 – July 14, 1967) was an American journalist, civil rights activist, attorney, and judge.[1][2] Miller was appointed to the Los Angeles County Superior Court by governor Edmund G. "Pat" Brown in 1964 and served until his death in 1967. Miller was a specialist in housing discrimination, whose involvement in the early stages of the Civil Rights Movement earned him a reputation as a tenacious fighter for equal housing opportunities for minorities. Miller argued some of the most historic civil rights cases ever heard before the Supreme Court of the United States. He was chief counsel before the court in the 1948 decision that led to the outlawing of racial restrictive covenants, Shelley v. Kraemer.
Miller won the court case Fairchild v. Raines (1944), a decision for a black Pasadena, California family that had bought a nonrestrictive lot but was sued by white neighbors anyway. See https://pasadenanow.com/main/how-a-black-pasadena-familys-challenge-to-white-only-real-estate-covenants-culminated-in-the-u-s-supreme-courts-landmark-ruling-outlawing-them-across-america
In April 1953, Miller successfully argued Barrows v. Jackson, 346 U.S. 249, before the Supreme Court of the United States. The Court held that racially restrictive covenants, which it had found unconstitutional in Shelley v. Kraemer, could not be "enforced at law by a suit for damages against a co-covenantor who allegedly broke the covenant." Barrows had been awarded damages when she sued Jackson for violation of a restrictive covenant that barred the sale of Jackson's property in Los Angeles to a "non-Caucasian." The trial court had reached that conclusion and it had been affirmed by California's District Court of Appeal for the Second Appellate District, after which the Supreme Court of California denied hearing.
In 1964, California Governor Pat Brown appointed Miller a Los Angeles Municipal Court Justice, where he served until his death.[15]