"Waste's opinions as a Justice of the state Appellate Courts have commanded high respect, and several have been selected by casebook editors to illustrate legal principles.

Waste's judicial conservatism was a matter of of principle. As an associate justice, he joined in holding unconstitutional an initiative measure which received a two-thirds vote of the electorate, although he was up for re-election at the primary election within two months. The rights of an infant American citizen of Japanese ancestory were upheld.

Under Waste's leadership, the Court gave careful consideration to the facts and law. The lengthy but clear opinion largely disabused the public mind of the charges that a perversion of justice had taken place. Within a year after the Mooney decision Waste received over a million votes for re-election, more than twice those cast for the opposition.

Waste's conservatism did not blind him to the need for change and and he was aware that the Court he joined had progressed into a new era while he was growing up. He had not yet been born when Terry killed Senator Broderick in a duel, but he was a college student when Field's body guard shot Terry to death. His peaceful nature, typified by a gentle,but strong-spirited, application of rule by principle and law without violence, and his long tenure on the bench, were both appropriate to his time and contrasted strongly with the extremes of pioneer justice which still existed at the time of his birth. It was during Waste's Chief Justiceship that the Court members began wearing judicial robes. By the time the twenty-first Chief Justice took office, the State had clearly come of age judicially, and the pioneer era was over.

Chief Justice Waste swearing Carter in as a justice, Sept. 12, 1939. It was during Waste's Chief Justiceship that the Court members began wearing judicial robes.

Waste was well aware of the growth, development and consequent changes that had taken place on both local and national levels during the relatively brief history of our nation, and of the need for men of principle to guide the process. In an address to five thousand Spanish-American War Veterans in 1935, he recognized that there was an inherent conflict in the historical development from the intense individuality of revolutionary America to the complex interdependence of the modern United States, and denied that there was any longer a right in our modem society for "any substitution of private will for public authority." "We cannot make men better by making more laws", he observed, and quoted President Coolidge that "there is no way by which we can substitute the authority of law for the virtue of man."

Waste knew how men can become virtuous, and in his personal life he quietly showed the way. A thread of service to mankind ran through his conscientious devotion to government and the law, leadership in his church, participation in fraternal orders, and his long service to various civic groups.

Waste was so ill during the last year of his life that he found it extremely difficult to carry his share of the Court's work. An old heart ailment became critical on May 23, 1940, and he died at his home in Berkeley in the late afternoon of June 6. Justices Gibson, Edmonds, and Carter, and the Clerk of the Supreme Court, B. Grant Taylor, were honorary pallbearers at the funeral services conducted at the Scottish Rite Temple in Oakland. Private services were held at Mountain View Cemetery in Oakland, after which his urn was placed in Sunset Cemetery near his Berkeley home.

Wilbur, then Senior Judge of the United States Circuit Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit, who had been associated with Waste three years on the Supreme Court, later said:
"No just estimate of Judge Waste can be made without taking into account his frank and devoted adherence of the teaching of Jesus Christ and his acknowledged obligation to follow the Divine Leader as best he could at all times and under all circumstances. He was determined to win in life, if he won at all, as an avowed Christian. The public accepted Judge Waste as a sincere Christian and registered approval again and again of his Christian character."