[3] After law school, Sanders became an active litigation attorney who, according to Seattle Metropolitan was "best known for representing builders and property owners battling land-use constraints.
"[3] In 1976, he was one of the first lawyers to defy the American Bar Association's Code of Professional Responsibility that proscribed public advertising.
[5] He was elected in 1995 to a partial term to fill a vacancy on the Washington Supreme Court, defeating Rosselle Pekelis despite a "not qualified" rating from the King County Bar Association.
He surprised the conservatives who had backed his first bid by adopting strong civil libertarian positions, casting the sole dissent against Washington's three-strikes law and frequently siding with criminal defendants in appellate cases, including one case in which he was the sole justice to posit that a Black motorist wrongfully arrested for a traffic violation had a right to resist arrest.
Sanders attracted controversy over a statement he made, and later retracted, that certain minority groups "have a crime problem", as well as his vote upholding a ban on gay marriage.