Sonoma County's new Hall of Justice in Santa Rosa gets its public debut today, with a 1 PM ribbon-cutting featuring California Chief Justice Patricia Guerrero and local judges. The six-story building holds 15 courtrooms, sits next to the county's decades-old Hall of Justice, and is designed to centralize criminal, traffic, and dependency proceedings for residents.

Seven levels of white walls and public hallways engulfed in natural light with a clear view of Santa Rosa, Bennett Peak and Sonoma and Taylor mountains from the top floor. And on the other side of doors along those hallways, courtrooms with matching layouts, pew-style seating and windows allowing the natural light to continue flowing inside. This is what the public should expect at Sonoma County’s new courthouse that is slated for a ribbon-cutting ceremony Friday afternoon, May 29, with full operations commencing this summer.

(Subscription required) The unanimous court held that a 50-year-old case affirming the blanket disqualification of individual judges does not mesh with the realities of California's judiciary today.

(Subscription required) A downtown Los Angeles federal courthouse was renamed Wednesday for the Mendez family, whose landmark school desegregation case helped lay the groundwork for Brown v. Board of Education.