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.

(Subscription required) The former Sacramento juvenile court presiding judge says appellate work is less immediate but steady and relentless. 

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.