Tarzana attorney Michael J. Libman has been disbarred for his role in purportedly conspiring with lawyers inside the Los Angeles City Attorney’s Office to initiate a “friendly” class-action lawsuit against the municipality over the Department of Water and Power’s 2013 rollout of a new problem-riddled billing system and allegations that he hired Israeli operatives to hack into personal accounts of a Los Angeles Superior Court judge.

(Subscription required) Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Susan J. Townsend draws on lessons learned from her immigrant parents, nearly two decades as a prosecutor and years of community work as she balances accountability with second chances. 

The complex legal battle for ex-San Francisco 49ers star Dana Stubblefield — who six years ago was imprisoned after a rape conviction and later got it overturned on appeal — entered a new phase this summer after the state Supreme Court vacated the reversal and ordered that it be re-evaluated under new case law. Now the 6th District Court of Appeal, which overturned Stubblefield’s conviction in 2024, must assess whether racially prejudicial language that a prosecutor gave in his closing arguments during the 2020 trial was a “harmless error” or if it unfairly swayed a jury. 

Stalled plans to turn a remote corner of California into a critical minerals and clean energy mecca have been dealt another setback. A state appeals court ruled this week that Imperial County’s approval of the Hell’s Kitchen lithium and geothermal energy project failed to show it has enough water supply from the dwindling Colorado River to sustain its operation, or to address the potential air quality impacts of diverting more water from the polluted Salton Sea, which has been shrinking for years.