Overview Attorneys preparing for oral argument before the California Supreme Court need to know how long it will take the court to order the case on calendar for argument. A previous SCOCAblog article showed that in general the court is taking longer to do so than in past years. To give attorneys the best estimate of the current pace, we evaluated the court’s most recent performance by calculating the average time it took for argument to occur from September 2023 to June 2024.[1] For that period we found: We also tracked the interval between the preliminary oral argument notification letter...

Overview This article unpacks the relationship California courts have with federal constitutional law via the Aranda/Bruton doctrine, which protects criminal defendants in joint trials against inculpative hearsay statements admitted against their codefendant under the Sixth Amendment’s confrontation clause.[1] The 2023 Supreme Court case Samia v. United States appears to constrict the federal Bruton doctrine significantly. In effect, though, it won’t. Bruton and its progeny do very little to protect criminal defendants, and lockstepping prevents California from doing any more. Rather than insulating California from rights-abrogating federal law, Proposition 8 (also called the Victim’s Bill of Rights) forces California to sway...

Overview State officials would benefit from a clear analytical approach to combating the new presidential administration’s onslaught of executive orders. We propose adapting Justice Jackson’s concurrence in Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer as a model for evaluating how to deploy state power against attempts to impose policy by federal executive decree.[1] Youngstown was a horizontal separation-of-powers decision that analyzed federal executive action against congressional power; here we show how its framework applies equally well to vertical federalism conflicts between the federal executive and the states. Analysis A proposed model for approaching conflicts between states and the federal executive...

Overview The November 2024 election ballot in Alameda County saw an unusual occurrence: overlapping recalls of the Alameda district attorney and the Oakland mayor. Media coverage of these recalls portrayed those separate county and city contest results as being very similar. But a more detailed look shows a noted discrepancy in the vote totals among the Oakland voters who could cast ballots for both officials. Price did significantly better in Oakland than Thao, mainly because a significant number of the pro-Price voters did not also cast a ballot in the mayoral recall. This is probably explained at least in part...

Overview The U.S. Supreme Court has consistently denied the press’s requests for special constitutional protection under the First Amendment. This is unlikely to change under the Roberts Court. In fact, the Court may roll back existing press protections in the coming years. Press advocates must now look to other sources of protection instead. One promising possibility is state constitutions. California’s constitution, in particular, operates as a valuable yet underutilized source of protection for journalists and other newsgatherers. Discussion The Press Clause of the First Amendment has little independent meaning. For decades, the high court has extended protection for the press...

Overview This year the California Supreme Court demonstrated that the past few years were a transition phase and gave some signs of what is to come. One year ago, in our 2023 year-in-review article, we observed that the court had settled into stasis, coalescing into such high unanimity that it simultaneously ruled out any appearance of partisan bias while also sparking concerns from other court watchers about uncritical groupthink and bare-minimum productivity. This year one factor in that discussion (the three-way split between the appointing governor blocs) remains the same, and in practice such partisan affiliation markers still provide no...