Justice Ming Chin by the numbers

Today, we're beginning a new series of monthly columns -- analytics-driven profiles of every justice of the California Supreme Court in order of seniority (although technically Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye is the senior justice on the court, we'll consider the chief justice third, between Justices Carol Corrigan and Goodwin Liu). Today, we begin with the senior justice on the high court by term of service, Justice Ming W. Chin, who was sworn in on March 1, 1996.

To date, Justice Chin has voted in 937 civil cases and 1,289 criminal, quasi-criminal, juvenile, disciplinary and mental health cases. He has written majority opinions in 129 civil cases -- 13.77 percent of the total number of cases he has participated in. His busiest year was 1997, when he wrote 10 majority opinions. His lightest year -- including his partial year in 1996 -- was 2014, when he wrote only one majority. Justice Chin has written 223 majority opinions in criminal cases, or 17.3 percent of the total. His busiest year was 2002, when he wrote 16 majority opinions in criminal cases. His lightest years -- leaving aside his partial years in 1996 and 2019 -- were 1998 and 2017, when he wrote majority opinions in five criminal cases.

Justice Chin has been a light writer of concurrences throughout his tenure. Since he took his seat, he has written only 16 concurrences in civil cases and 25 in criminal cases. He also wrote 39 dissents in civil cases and 26 in criminal cases.

Justice Chin's contribution to California jurisprudence spans virtually the entire scope of California's civil law. He has written an opinion in 33 cases involving government parties or administrative law. In 24 of those cases, Justice Chin wrote the majority opinion. He's written in 27 cases involving civil procedure issues (19 of them majorities), 26 tort cases (20 majorities), 22 employment cases (17 majorities), 21 constitutional law cases (nine majorities), 13 arbitration cases (four majorities) and 11 insurance cases (nine majorities). During his 24 years on the high court, he has written at least one opinion in cases involving 20 different fields of civil law.

His contribution to criminal law is equally wide-ranging. Justice Chin has written an opinion in 75 death penalty cases (67 of them majority opinions), 56 criminal procedure cases (46 majorities), 38 sentencing cases (32 majorities), 28 constitutional law cases (21 majorities), 24 violent crimes cases (22 majorities), 18juvenile offenses cases (14 majorities), 10 habeas corpus cases (three majorities) and 10 sexual offenses cases (all 10 majority opinions). He has written at least one opinion in 13 different fields of criminal and quasi-criminal law.

Across Justice Chin's tenure, the California Supreme Court has decided 63.29 percent of its civil cases unanimously. Yearly unanimity numbers show two distinct periods. Between 1990 and 2007, the court's aggregate unanimity rate in civil cases was only 53.4 percent. But from 2008 to today, the unanimity rate has been 78.21 percent.

One way in which a justice's degree of philosophical alignment with the Supreme Court can be assessed is by calculating how often he or she voted with the majority. There's no partial credit in this statistic -- a vote to affirm in part and reverse in part isn't agreement with a majority which chose to affirm outright. To date, Justice Chin has voted with the majority in 92.85 percent of his civil cases. Although there were substantially more dissents during the years 1990 to 2007 as the unanimity rate hovered in the 50s and 60s, Justice Chin seldom joined the minority. He voted with the majority 91.95 percent of the time between 1990 and 2007 and 94.2 percent of the time from 2008 to today. Nor has that number changed much over the past eight years with the addition of Justices Liu, Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar and Leondra Kruger. Between 2011 and today, Justice Chin has voted with the majority in 240 of 257 civil cases, for a majority rate of 93.3 percent -- almost identical to his long-term trend.

Between 1996 and 2019, the California Supreme Court's unanimity rate in criminal cases is slightly higher than in civil matters -- 71.26 percent. Just as was the case with civil decisions, the court's unanimity rate on the criminal side was noticeably higher for the years 2008 to 2019. Between 1990 and 2007, 62.76 percent of the court's criminal cases were unanimous. From 2008 to 2019, 80.35 percent of the criminal decisions were unanimous. Since he joined the court in 1996, Justice Chin has voted with the majority in 95.42 percent of his criminal cases. Justice Chin voted with the majority in 96.04 percent of his criminal cases between 1996 and 2007, and 94.77 percent of criminal cases from 2008 to 2019. Justice Chin's majority rate has not noticeably fallen with the three Brown appointees: since 2011, Justice Chin has voted with the majority in 93.27 percent of criminal cases.

Justice Chin has written an opinion in 107 of the 619 unanimous civil decisions in which he has voted. He has filed opinions in 28 cases decided 6-1, 21 civil cases decided 5-2, and 37 cases decided 4-3. He has written the majority opinion in 95 civil cases decided unanimously. He has also written majority opinions in 18 civil cases decided 6-1, 12 decided 5-2, and 13 decided 4-3. His civil concurrences have generally been in unanimous decisions -- 13 were filed in unanimous cases, two in 6-1 cases, and one each in 5-2 and 4-3 decisions. Most of Justice Chin's civil dissents have come in cases decided 4-3. He has filed dissents in 24 cases decided by a one-vote margin, seven 5-2 decisions, and eight dissents in 6-1 decisions.

Justice Chin has written an opinion in 173 unanimous criminal decisions, 37 criminal cases decided 6-1, 37 5-2 decisions, and in 28 4-3 decisions. Of his majority opinions, 67.98 percent have been written in unanimous criminal cases. Twenty-eight majorities were in 6-1 cases, 25 were in cases decided 5-2, and 20 were in 4-3 cases. Justice Chin writes the vast majority of his concurring opinions in unanimous decisions -- he has written 16 concurrences to unanimous opinions, three in 6-1 decisions, four in 5-2 decisions and zero in 4-3 decisions. Justice Chin's dissents in criminal cases also tend to be in 4-3 votes -- he has filed seven dissents in 6-1 criminal decisions, eight in 5-2 decisions, and a dozen in 4-3 cases.

The media typically uses the party of the appointing authority -- the president at the federal level and the governor in most states -- as a rough proxy for whether an appellate court's decisions are likely to be conservative, moderate or liberal, notwithstanding repeated demonstrations by academic analysts of appellate decision making that as a proxy, it's imprecise at best and misleading at worst, both because it doesn't account for a judge's views evolving and because it implicitly assumes that all nominees are thoroughly vetted and chosen exclusively for their views.

A better proxy for placing appellate judges on a philosophical spectrum is that justice's agreement rate with his or her colleagues. This is so because effective control of an appellate court doesn't depend solely on how many justices would be roughly categorized as "conservative" or "liberal," but rather on the justices' voting patterns. If three Republican justices tend to vote similarly across a range of issues and the four Democratic justices are much less predictable, the outnumbered Republican justices will have effective voting control of the court. Agreement rates are also an important tool for analyzing an oral argument as well: Was a justice who asked several apparently skeptical questions a "must have" vote or in your "unlikely" column?

In order to account for philosophical evolution, we calculate agreement rates in six-year increments. We also limit our database to non-unanimous cases in order to clearly see distinctions.

Between 1996 and 2001, Justice Chin's agreement rates with Justice Marvin Baxter, Chief Justice Ronald George and Justice Janice Rogers Brown were quite close -- 76.34 percent, 76.15 percent and 71.65 percent, respectively. Justices Chin and Kathryn Werdegar agreed in 61.24 percent of civil cases, and Chin agreed with Justice Stanley Mosk in 50.42 percent of non-unanimous civil cases. The justice most at odds with Justice Chin during those years was Justice Joyce Kennard, with an agreement rate of 50.38 percent.

Justice Chin's agreement rates with the other Republican nominees began to drift up between 2002 and 2007. Justices Chin and Baxter agreed in 87 percent of civil cases. Justices Chin and Corrigan agreed in 81.82 percent of non-unanimous civil cases. The next two agreement rates were two more Republican nominees -- Justice Brown, 77.97 percent and Chief Justice George, 75.76 percent. Justice Carlos Moreno, the lone Democratic appointee at the time, had an agreement rate of 62 percent with Justice Chin, followed by Justice Werdegar (53.61 percent) and Justice Kennard (48 percent).

Between 2008 and 2013, Justice Chin's agreement rates with Justices Corrigan and Baxter were almost identical -- 88.89 percent and 88.64 percent, respectively. He agreed with Chief Justice George in 75 percent of cases and with George's successor Chief Justice Cantil-Sakauye in 70.59 percent of cases. Two Democratic appointees and two Republican appointees were the lowest rates -- Justice Liu, 50 percent; Justice Werdegar, 45.83 percent; Justice Moreno, 42.86 percent, and Justice Kennard, 40.91 percent.

In recent years, although Justice Chin's highest agreement rates are still with Republican appointees, his numbers have drifted down a bit. Justice Baxter's agreement rate with Justice Chin between 2014 and 2018 is 71.43 percent. His agreement rate with the chief justice is 70.59 percent. Justices Chin and Corrigan are next at 67.65 percent, and Justice Kennard is at 66.67 percent. The remaining civil agreement rates are Justice Cuéllar (59.26 percent), Justice Werdegar (54.84 percent), Justice Liu (47.06 percent) and Justice Kruger (44.44 percent).

Turning to the criminal docket, Justice Chin's voting record has been most comparable to his Republican colleagues (excepting Justice Kennard) in every period. From 1996 to 2001, Justice Chin and Chief Justice George had an agreement rate of 91.75 percent. Justice Baxter was next at 86.21 percent, followed by Justices Brown and Werdegar at 72.63 percent and 72.45 percent, respectively. Justices Chin and Kennard agreed in 59.8 percent of non-unanimous criminal cases, and Justice Mosk's rate was only 35 percent. For the years 2002 through 2007, Justices Corrigan and Baxter and Chief Justice George all agreed with Justice Chin in most close criminal cases -- 92.31 percent, 88.89 percent and 82.57 percent, respectively. Justices Chin and Brown had a 72.86 percent agreement rate. Justices Chin and Moreno had an agreement rate of 70 percent -- a substantial change from Justice Mosk's 35 percent in the previous period. Justice Werdegar was next at 68.18 percent, and Justice Kennard was last at 48.18 percent.

For the years 2008 to 2013, once again Justice Chin's closest matches were the four Republican appointees. Chief Justices George and Cantil-Sakauye had agreement rates with Justice Chin of 91.18 percent and 90.91 percent. Justice Baxter was next at 88.89 percent, followed by Justices Corrigan (84.72 percent) and Werdegar (66.67 percent). Justices Chin and Liu were at 54.17 percent. Justice Moreno's agreement rate was 47.5 percent, and Justice Kennard's was 45.07 percent.

Justice Chin's two highest agreement rates between 2014 and 2018 were Justices Baxter and Kennard at 100 percent, but both of those were based on a very small number of cases each voted in before leaving the Court. Among the other Justices, Justice Corrigan's agreement rate was 83.67 percent. The chief justice's was 81.63 percent. Justices Chin and Kruger were at 56.76 percent. Justice Cuéllar's agreement rate was 51.35 percent, Justice Werdegar was at 48.57 percent, and Justice Liu was at 32.65 percent.

The data shows that throughout his 23-year career, Justice Chin has been one of the votes to watch on the California Supreme Court: Regardless of whether the ultimate outcome was arguably "conservative" or "liberal," Justice Chin is nearly always with the majority. Justice Chin appears, at least in civil cases, to file dissenting opinions strategically, when flipping a single vote will reverse the result of the case. Throughout his tenure, Justice Chin has voted fairly consistently with his conservative colleagues.