(Subscription required) A former appellate attorney and class action partner, Superior Court Judge Esther K. Ro draws on diversion tools, careful reasoning and experience to navigate the daily pressures of a high-volume misdemeanor courtroom.

(Subscription required) An appeals court reversed an arbitration order, holding BMW could not enforce a dealership arbitration clause against a consumer's Song-Beverly warranty claims, vacating the arbitration award and judgment, and remanding the case for further trial court proceedings.

We spent much of the past year talking with dozens of people who’ve interacted with CARE Court as participants, petitioners and as employees trying to fulfill the program’s goals. Here’s a sampling of their experiences.

To assess the program, CalMatters requested housing information from California’s 25 largest counties, as well as all of the ones that first launched the program. Of the 2,362 CARE Court petitions filed in those counties, fewer than a third were for people who were homeless.