Chief Justice focuses on courts’ efforts to help wider variety of litigants

In another recent address providing a clear contrast to many she gave during the Great Recession decrying funding cuts to the judiciary, Chief Justice Tani G. Cantil-Sakauye focused her state of the judiciary speech Tuesday on a wider range of issues, increasing access to justice, gender and race bias, and the coming retirement of Justice Ming W. Chin.

She also told the Legislature about work the courts have been doing, including efforts to help litigants who are low-income, homeless or don't speak English.

Cantil-Sakauye has increasingly spoken publicly in recent years about how her gender has affected her legal career. She began her afternoon speech in the California Senate by noting 2020 is the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, giving women the right to vote.

But she quickly pivoted to her husband's Japanese American parents, both of whom were in the audience, who spent World War II in internment camps. Her 91-year-old father-in-law volunteered to serve in the Korean War just a few years later.

She also thanked members of the Assembly for passing a resolution last year marking Feb. 19 -- the day in 1942 when President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the executive order calling for the internment of 120,000 Japanese Americans -- as a Day of Remembrance in apology for the state's role in enforcing that policy.

"These actions of remembrance and apology in a time of national bans, xenophobia and hostility are beacons of hope," she said.

A former Republican, Cantil-Sakauye has sometimes been critical of President Donald Trump and his administration. In 2017, she made headlines by calling for federal authorities to stop immigration arrests at state courthouses, something the U.S. Department of Justice argues has been made necessary by California's sanctuary state policies. This time around, she never mentioned Trump directly and made only a passing reference to "federal immigration interference in our state justice system."

From there she moved on to an extended homage to the state Supreme Court's first Chinese American justice. Chin announced in January he will leave the court Aug. 31, his 78th birthday.

She noted Chin is the son of "Chinese immigrant ... potato farmers ... who never finished elementary school" and said his career "personifies the California dream." Chin worked in the fields himself, rose to become a captain in the U.S. Army and went on to a groundbreaking legal career, the chief justice said.

Cantil-Sakauye then cited the case mentioned first in most news stories about Chin's retirement: People v. Humphrey, 13 Cal.4th 826 (1997).

This is the opinion Chin wrote shortly after joining the court -- and just months after making many of the same arguments in a stinging appellate dissent -- that legitimized battered woman's syndrome as a legal defense in a domestic violence prosecution. Chin found a woman who killed her husband could present evidence of his years-long abuse in trying to prove she acted in self-defense.

"In 1997, I'm creating the first ever domestic violence court in Sacramento," she said, recalling her time on the superior court in the state capital. "We don't even have a name like collaborative court or restorative justice court. Justice Chin's decision recognizing battered women's syndrome is groundbreaking because it finally allows us to understand the pathology of domestic violence."

Such courts are necessary, she said, because courts find themselves taking the brunt of many of society's ills. With that in mind, she said, she will appoint a working group to study how the courts can help address the homelessness crisis.

"In recent times, all of us have come to understand that racial and income inequality often create barriers to access to justice and affects the democracy each of us experiences," she said. "So, for example, in California we have the highest poverty rate in the nation. In California we have over 50% of the nation's population of homeless."

She then touted the more than 400 collaborative courts that have been "created or expanded" during her time in office. These include a new human trafficking prevention court in Fresno and a veteran's justice court in San Francisco.

The main body of her speech focused on her priorities for the court system this year. Cantil-Sakauye said one of her priorities has been "three-dimensional access to justice. That is, that justice be equal, that it be physical and that it be online."

Gov. Gavin Newsom's first annual budget last year gave courts a long-sought half-billion-dollar boost. This allowed the court system to begin to address a maintenance and construction backlog.

Other efforts seek to save litigants from visiting the court at all. For instance, state innovation grant money has been used to create mobile apps and virtual self-help services. Meanwhile, Newsom's proposed 2020-21 state budget, introduced in January, would spend $131.2 million on interpreters and language access, a jump of $8.9 million.