Category: Uncategorized

Overview There are two takeaways from this year’s general election results for the contests involving Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascón, Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price, and Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao. Combined with the recall of San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin, these contests are a clear voter rejection of sentencing reform and progressive prosecutors. And obvious flaws in recent changes to recall laws at the state and local level are now causing headaches for local officials struggling to apply the tangled new procedures to these contests. The results show that attempts by elected officials to discourage recalls failed,...

 Overview This article is not about Chief Justice Patricia Guerrero. Nor is it about Associate Justice Patricia Guerrero of the California Supreme Court. Instead, it is about the Justice Patricia Guerrero who sat on the Court of Appeal, Fourth District, Division One from December 2017 to March 2022. For this article we analyzed all merits decisions that Justice Guerrero participated in and looked for trends. We found nothing unusual. Instead, we learned that Justice Guerrero was a typical modern California appellate justice: her opinions had a high unanimity rate, she often voted with her colleagues, and she reversed consistently with...

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...

In a radio interview with LAist today (click here for audio) Brandon V. Stracener, senior research fellow with the California Constitution Center, reviews the issues likely in play in the argument on Legislature v. Weber in the California Supreme Court. The case will be argued on Wednesday, May 8, 2024, at 9:00 am, in San Francisco.

Overview In 2021 Texas enacted a law (SB 8) that prohibits abortions after the fetal heartbeat has been detected and empowers private citizens to sue anyone who has (or intends to) perform, aid, or abet such an abortion.[1] The law also bars “enforcement” by state and local government, except that a court must award an injunction, statutory damages not less than $10,000, and attorney fees if the claimant prevails.[2] California has now enacted a copycat law (SB 1327) that employs the same mechanisms to permit citizen enforcement of certain California firearms laws.[3] Doing so wrongly validates a law that undermines...

And now the answers to the SCOCA justices trivia quiz. Thanks again to the friendly law librarians, who were good sports and kindly donated their time and expertise to checking these facts. 1. The only justice to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court. Stephen Johnson Field served on the California Supreme Court for about five and half years (as the court’s fifth chief justice for part of that time) before serving nearly 35 years on the U.S. Supreme Court. 2. The only justice born in the 1700s. Alexander Outlaw Anderson was born November 10, 1794 at Soldier’s Rest in Tennessee....

Judicial staff attorneys are talented public servants who dedicate their lives to quiet service behind the scenes. To celebrate California’s reopening and give them a bit of post-pandemic fun for the upcoming holiday weekend, we prepared a SCOCA justices trivia quiz. We will post the answers on Fri 30 Jul 2021, so anyone can play along. Having researched our answers and checked them with authoritative sources (be nice to your local law librarians!) we are confident in their accuracy. But we’re good sports and truth seekers, so if the staff attorneys can demonstrate that their answer to a question is...

May 7, 2021, 1:00 to 5:00Click here to register! Every ten years, based upon the census, states redraw lines for congressional and state legislative seats; some win, some lose. This intensely political process was delayed and reshaped this year by the global pandemic. By the end of April, the relevant data will be released and the second California Citizens Redistricting Commission will go to work. It must confront the potential loss of a congressional seat, changes to the Voting Rights Act, defining communities of interest, and new rules governing how incarcerated individuals will be geographically assigned, among other issues. Program...

The Recorder reports that (after a head-fake to the Court of Appeal) in a surprise announcement Governor Brown has nominated the man in charge of searching for someone to fill Justice Werdegar’s empty seat to himself be that replacement: judicial appointments adviser Joshua Groban. Accordingly, our “days since Justice Werdegar’s retirement” countup clock has stopped at eighteen months.

FEDERALISM NOW UC Berkeley School of Law Friday 03 November 2017 9:00 to 5:30 Free admission, registration required. Click here to register! This full-day conference will bring together a diverse set of scholars, practitioners, and policymakers to explore what federalism means now. In this era of shifting state and federal policy positions, what constraints and opportunities does federalism present? Can people of different views agree on rules and principles to guide us going forward? The day is divided between a framing panel and two topical panels, one focusing on federalism and environmental law (climate change, specifically) and the other focusing...