Aiming to relieve some of the pressure on courts overwhelmed by case backlogs, California’s Judicial Council voted to allocate a second round of Covid-19 court funding at its meeting on Friday, where it also heard an update on a pilot project to lower traffic fines and help residents pay their tickets online.

Courts will get slices of the $25 million pie based on the portions of workload that hadn’t been disposed of during the pandemic from March through August 2020, compared to the same time frame in 2019.

(Subscription required) The state courts have spearheaded a series of efforts in recent years to address discrimination, harassment, and retaliation -- including Rule 10.351, which the Judicial Council adopted in January 2020 and requires each court to update its policies on how court employees can prevent, report, and resolve complaints related to these issues.

It took an unusually long time for the Supreme Court to rule on the petition for review in Wood v. Superior Court, reported yesterday. The petition was filed on May 21, 2020. But it wasn’t until this week that the court denied the petition.