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...

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...