Category: Analysis

Overview Access to voting in languages other than English is essential in California — a historically multilingual and multicultural state, where 44% of households (the highest in the nation) speak a language other than English at home, and over 11% of the citizen voting age population (2.94 million Californians) speak English less than very well.[1] Fortunately, the California constitution protects language access for voters with an express right to vote that includes an implied right for voters to access the ballot in non-English languages. This right is founded on history and tradition, the intent and evolution of the state’s article...

Overview There are wide public school facility funding disparities between the poorest and richest school districts in California. A pending case in Alameda Superior Court, Rodriguez v. State of California, challenges the constitutionality of this disparity, which is inadequately addressed by California’s primary state-run program for providing grant funding to local school districts for facility capital needs (the School Facility Program or SFP). Although the SFP distributes state bond money to school districts, because the bulk of school facility financing relies on local property taxes, the system necessarily produces funding inequality due to the differences in local property values. In...

Overview The California Supreme Court ordered supplemental briefing on the following question: “Does the Legislature have authority to declare that certain errors are a ‘miscarriage of justice’ within the meaning of article VI, section 13 of the California Constitution and thereby obligate courts to reverse a judgment whenever such an error is found, even when the error in question would otherwise be subject to review for harmless error?” The court is asking this question in three Racial Justice Act (RJA) cases, People v. Barrera, People v. Chhuon & Pan, and People v. Bankston. The court should answer its question by...

Our friends at At the Lectern kindly linked to our SCOCA year in review 2025 and mentioned different sources of opinion counts, noting that “Stanford Law School’s Supreme Court of California Resources has what seems to be an authoritative list of 61 opinions for the 1987 calendar year.” Again, we concur and dissent, but explaining the differences will show why everyone can be somewhat right-and-wrong here. First, we concede a typo on our part: our count for cases decided by majority opinion in 1987 is 38 (not 37) and the article has been updated. Next, we should have been clearer...

Overview This year it’s apparent that the California Supreme Court has settled into a new normal. As our results show, over the past five years the court’s metrics in general have been rather consistent. Opinion counts remain low, unanimity has fallen to more familiar levels, straight grants are flat, civil cases continue to dominate the docket, and reversals are still the predominant result. This suggests that the court has moved out of the transition phase we posited in last year’s review and that the current trends may be durable. Here we also investigate the possibility we raised last year of...

Overview Courts sometimes signal to the legislature that it should resolve an ambiguity by amending the law. But the legislature does not always respond. Faced with legislative inaction, what should the judiciary do? This question arose in two recent cases, People v. Burgos and People v. Aguirre, which expose a deeper divide on the California Supreme Court over how to treat legislative silence when interpreting statutes. In Burgos and Aguirre the court resorts to a rigid, formalist framework, with two dissenting justices championing a functional inquiry. Yet under either approach lower courts would have a difficult time applying Estrada, reflecting...

Overview When the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022) 597 U.S. 215 reverted many questions about abortion rights back to the states, it set the stage for an interstate battle over telemedicine services that cross state lines. The opening moves in that battle are already playing out, and it is too early to predict who will prevail in that fight. But it may all soon be moot if the Federal Drug Administration restricts the current availability of mifepristone though telehealth. Several state attorneys general are currently urging the FDA to do so — a move...

Overview Facial recognition technology and AI-driven surveillance raise urgent and pressing questions about privacy. One company in particular, Clearview AI, has created controversy over its surveillance technology. The company has been banned in Canada, sanctioned across Europe, and faced lawsuits challenging its practices in the United States. One such lawsuit, Renderos v. Clearview AI, is currently making its way through California courts. The case represents one of the first tests for courts to determine how modern AI surveillance interacts with California’s once-strong privacy protections. As a matter of both law and public policy, the courts should take the opportunity to...