(Subscription required) Judges must resist external and internal pressures to avoid becoming either a servant or king, which takes courage and humility -- the yin and the yang of judicial independence.

(Subscription required) Born on April 3, 1919, Smith was admitted to the California Bar in January 1943 at 23 and remained active in legal and scholarly circles for more than 82 years. She was widely celebrated for her intellect, generosity, and unwavering commitment to justice and education.

(Subscription required) Ford’s RICO suit alleged that the lemon law lawyers billed “phantom legal fees” and in hundreds of lemon law cases, with at least 50% of the $100 million billed over the past decade fraudulently inflated. The dismissal motions, filed on Friday, allege Ford failed to adequately allege that the law firms associated together under RICO.

The current Supreme Court is creating precisely this problem by issuing many important rulings as brief, unsigned orders on its so-called emergency docket. On this docket (also known as the shadow docket), the votes among the nine justices are not public, and the majorities typically offer little explanation for their decisions. Yet the justices have used the emergency docket this year to hand down a series of rulings allowing President Trump to expand executive power and alter the structure of government.