Justice Chin stays busy to the end, writing opinion on his last day on the state high court

Monday was state Supreme Court Justice Ming W. Chin's last day on the court, but he wasn't easing his way into retirement.

Chin cast a deciding vote and authored the majority opinion in a case involving whether a Section 8 beneficiary's compensation for providing in-home care for a severely disabled adult daughter should be excluded from income in calculating the rental subsidy. He ruled it should be excluded.

He also spent Sunday and Monday afternoon signing other opinions. He signed 22 Sunday, and said he still had more to go during a telephone interview Monday, his 78th birthday. In between, he got on a Zoom call with the other justices.

Once he's done with duties as a justice, Chin will stay busy doing things like giving an annual update on employment law. And he will stop to collect some honors as well.

"I'm not exactly retiring," he said.

While Chin announced his retirement in January, Gov. Gavin Newsom has not nominated anyone to fill his position. Court of Appeal justices will sit pro tempore, going in alphabetical order, while Chin's position is vacant.

The governor's spokeswoman, Danella Debel, said in an email Monday he plans to appoint a justice in the next few months.

A 1996 appointee of Gov. Pete Wilson and the court's first Chinese-American justice, Chin has often been a more conservative voice on an increasingly liberal court. But the state high court does not have as many sharp ideological divisions as its federal counterpart.

Monday's 4-3 decision to reverse an appellate court ruling was rare, but Chin wrote an opinion that was joined by two of the most liberal voices on the court, Justices Goodwin H. Liu and Mariano-Florentino Cuellar along with another appointee of Gov. Jerry Brown, Justice Joshua P. Groban. Reilly v. Marin County Authority, 2020 DJDAR 9555 (S. Sup. Ct., filed Aug. 31, 2020).

The state high court is accustomed lately to being shorthanded, having spent more than a year between the retirement of Justice Kathryn M. Werdegar and the confirmation of Groban in December 2018.