Overview Each year, California’s legislature enacts dozens of trailer bills to implement the state budget — and all likely are unconstitutional. Trailer bills are described as “a fairly outrageous assault on the legislative process,”[1] or as “half-baked bills written behind closed doors.”[2] Even the state’s high court has characterized fiscal legislation as “particularly susceptible to abuse.”[3] The constitutional problem is that adopting substantive policy bills within larger trailer bills spanning countless topics violates the single-subject rule. Other states have express permission in their state constitutions for similar budget-implementing legislation. California does not, and the state’s courts have yet to strike...

Overview California’s equal protection jurisprudence tells the story of a court that briefly surpassed the federal Supreme Court, only to drift back towards it. Since then, the California Supreme Court has never resolved the core question of how much legislative fiction is tolerable in rational basis cases. That mystery has only become more problematic as the real conflict in many modern equal protection cases is not about rationality, but lawmakers’ sincerity and choice of instrument. California should finish what it started and adopt a purpose-first, means-based rational basis review. This flows from the independent California constitutional principles that once led...

Overview Modern product liability law was created because new industrial technologies attenuated the relationship between manufacturers and consumers.[1] The resulting power imbalance required rethinking existing legal obligations. The question then was: in our new industrialized society, who is in a better position to bear the costs of harm caused by defective products? Today, social media raises the same question. Social media companies manufacture, market, and distribute products designed to maximize user engagement by any means necessary.[2] These companies are in the best position to implement safer designs and bear the costs of harm done by their products. But courts are...

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...