In a press statement issued Wednesday, Brian K. Taylor, the court’s executive officer, announced that Judge William J. Pendergast III and Judge Shauna L. Chastain are the new Presiding and Assistant Presiding judges, respectively. They will assume their new roles beginning Jan. 1.

Now the defiance is coming from inside the judicial branch itself, in the form of a lower-court mutiny against the Supreme Court. District Court judges, and in some cases even appellate courts, have either defied orders of the court outright or engaged in malicious compliance and evasion of those orders, in transparent bad faith.

In a ruling published Tuesday, a three-judge panel at California’s 3rd Appellate District took up

The court will hear