(Subscription required) Dear spent almost his entire career at California’s high court, helping shape justices’ decisions on the state’s biggest legal issues, from the death penalty to gay marriage to how workers should be classified.

Div. Seven of this district’s Court of Appeal has held that a survival clause in a woman’s revocable living trust naming her three children as beneficiaries, but providing that a child who did not survive her by more than 30 days would be deemed “for all purposes” to have died before her, was insufficient to overcome California’s anti-lapse statute and cut-off inheritance by the children of a son who predeceased her.

In a quartet of cases, the California Supreme Court last week made its first rulings interpreting the state’s Racial Justice Act (RJA), a landmark statute designed to eradicate racial bias from criminal prosecutions. Among its rulings, the court overturned a death sentence imposed after a prosecutor compared the defendant, a Black man, to a “Bengal tiger.” But otherwise, two justices argued, the court narrowed the law’s protections — raising the bar for RJA violations and allowing “harmless” violations to go unremedied — in ways contrary to the statute’s text and broad remedial purpose.

(Subscription required) After a 33-year career as a Los Angeles County prosecutor, Judge Georgia A. Huerta achieved a longtime goal of joining the bench. Now she's presiding over unlawful detainer cases in West Covina.