(Subscription required) Justice Joan K. Irion believed courts belonged not only to judges and lawyers, but to the public they served. Over more than two decades on the 4th District Court of Appeal, Division One, Irion became known as a rigorous appellate jurist, a probing questioner and one of California's most active advocates for civic education, judicial independence, and access to justice. 

Div. Eight of this district’s Court of Appeal held Thursday that a judge did not err in ordering Uber Technologies Inc. to hand over documents, pursuant to an administrative subpoena duces tecum issued by a state agency tasked with workplace safety, relating to a driver who purportedly fell down a flight of stairs during a delivery, leading to his death several days later.

The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has answered in the negative the question of whether the Nov. 19, 1794 “Treaty of Amity, Commerce, and Navigation, Between His Britannic Majesty and the United States of America”—commonly referred to as the Jay Treaty—is violated by requiring that Indigenous Americans born in Canada obtain an alien registration number as a requisite to purchasing a firearm in the U.S.

The Supreme Court on Monday reinstated a murder conviction in the 1979 disappearance of 6-year-old Etan Patz. The justices, by a 6-3 vote, granted an appeal from New York prosecutors who had urged them to undo a federal appeals court decision that overturned the verdict. The three liberal justices dissented.