Author: California Constitution Center
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...
California was admitted as the 31st state of the Union 175 years ago today on September 9, 1850. The matter was fraught with tensions of the day, with debates raging here and in Congress over the state’s boundaries, whether it should be one state or two, and of course the slavery question. Following the failure of the Wilmot Proviso (which would have banned slavery in territory acquired from Mexico in the Mexican–American War), Congress instead adopted the Compromise of 1850. Among the package of bills were provisions admitting California as a free state, organizing the remaining portions of the Mexican...
Overview The California Supreme Court is taking more time to decide fewer cases, and its majority opinions are getting longer. In the past, when the court was writing shorter majority opinions it did so faster and produced more of them. The current condition in general stems from trends in automatic appeals and civil cases, with each case type showing distinct contributing effects. These general and specific trends are most pronounced after recent trend inflections revealed significant distinctions between the case types. The court is deciding fewer automatic appeals and taking much longer to decide them. But these decisions are not...
Join friends, colleagues, and family for a celebration and retrospective on the life and career of Joseph R. Grodin, a unique figure connecting the UC law SF school and the California Supreme Court, as a former California Supreme Court justice and professor of law at UC Law San Francisco.This event will overview his jurisprudence as a justice on the Court of Appeal and California Supreme Court, his legal scholarship, and the historical and legal significance of the 1986 retention election. Open entry without registration, and broadcast on Zoom after Justice Kruger’s opening remarks. Click here to RSVP Click here for...
Joshua Spivak, senior research fellow at the California Constitution Center, died peacefully in his sleep on July 12, 2025 at age 51. He was the nation’s foremost — nay, only — expert on recall elections. He was a thinker and scholar who published many works to define the field he pioneered: books, academic journal articles, and hundreds of public commentary pieces. A frequent contributor to news programs and stories, Josh was everyone’s first call whenever a recall petition was filed somewhere. With his grand view, vast knowledge, and great passion for the subject, he was the definitive authority on recall...
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...
With just 30 days left before the California Supreme Court conference we have some FYI updates: We’re working hard to bring you a good experience. See you soon!
Our friends at the Brennan Center’s State Court Report have published a collection of advice for law students from eight sitting and former state supreme court justices. Read it here. The headliner is California Supreme Court Justice Goodwin Liu. Perhaps the best is this pithy reflection by Arizona Supreme Court Justice Clint Bolick: “I would have advised myself to get better grades.” Sage advice for those of us who weren’t the smartest bears in the room back then, if only we knew. Subscribe to the State Court Report newsletter here — it’s a great resource for anyone interested in state...
