The California Appellate Law Podcast

Justice Anita Earls and the Court as an Institution: Part 1

Tim Kowal & Jeff Lewis Season 1 Episode 137

Justice Anita Earls of the North Carolina Supreme Court knows about some reforms that will improve our justice system. But she also knows about some that will provoke an unhappy response—including an investigation against her personally.

In this first part of our interview, we discuss Justice Earls’ path from a 30-year civil rights attorney to supreme court justice, and many data- and experience-driven reforms that aim to alleviate prison loads, criminal dockets, and get juveniles reformed rather than mired in the penal system. We also discuss some positive civil-rights trajectories over her career (such as increased scrutiny of abusive police practices), and not-so-positive trajectories (such as qualified immunity, as ever, a parade of absurdities).

This will set us up to discuss how Justice Earls found herself under investigation for calling for judicial reform, which we’ll cover in part two.

Anita Earls’ wiki, LinkedIn profile, and Twitter/X feed.

Appellate Specialist Jeff Lewis' biography, LinkedIn profile, and Twitter feed.

Appellate Specialist Tim Kowal's biography, LinkedIn profile, Twitter feed, and YouTube page.

Sign up for Not To Be Published, Tim Kowal’s weekly legal update, or view his blog of recent cases.

Other items discussed in the episode:

Tim Kowal  0:00  
Welcome by way of prolog. This is part one of a two part episode with North Carolina Supreme Court Justice Anita earls. We at the podcast became aware of justice Anita Earls by a podcast alum, Aliza schatzman, who told us that she would be a great podcast guest and and she had a little bit of controversy in the recent past involving a state judicial council investigation followed by her own lawsuit for for free speech. It all stemmed from Justice Earl's comments about a lack of diversity on the North Carolina bench, and we had a conversation that spanned about judicial institutionalism and checks on the Judiciary. We also talked about the legal Accountability Project, which we've talked about on this podcast before. It's a wide ranging discussion, but in part one, please get to know justice earls and her background as a three decades long civil rights attorney leading to being elected to the bench Supreme Court of the North Carolina just very interesting figure talks about her views on on diversity and how we can use data and experience to improve diversity on the bench and improve the practice of law in our profession. So please enjoy part one of our interview with North Carolina Supreme Court Associate Justice Anita earls. Welcome

Announcer  1:20 
to the California appellate podcast, a discussion of timely trial tips and the latest cases and news coming from the California Court of Appeal and the California Supreme Court. And now your hosts, Tim Kowal and Jeff Lewis,

Jeff Lewis  1:33 
welcome everyone. I am Jeff Lewis

Tim Kowal  1:34 
and I'm Tim Kowal, AS certified appellate specialist, both Jeff and I face a lot of unusual problems that come up at trial and on appeal and in this podcast, bringing you recent cases and guests, we expose you to the unusual. You find this podcast helpful, please recommend it to a colleague. Yeah, and

Jeff Lewis  1:50 
if you like being surprised in your legal practice, take this as your spoiler alert. All

Tim Kowal  1:55 
right, Jeff, today, I think we have the unusual privilege today of being being able to host our very first Supreme Court guest, we are pleased to privilege to introduce North Carolina Associate Justice Anita Earls to the show today. Justice Earls is an Associate Justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court. Before taking office in January of 2019 she was a civil rights attorney litigating voter rights police misconduct and other civil rights cases. For 30 years, he was she had been appointed by President Clinton as a Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the United States Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division from 1998 to 2000 she has served on the North Carolina state board of elections, the North Carolina Equal Access to Justice Commission, and currently co chairs the governor's task force on racial equity in criminal justice. Justice Earls, welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for joining us.

Anita Earls  2:52  
Well, thank you so much for having me.

Tim Kowal  2:54  
Well, Justice Earl, can we just get right into it? And we have talked with with a few guests on our podcast about civil rights a little bit, and diversity on the bench, equal justice. We've talked about some initiatives in California, the bias prevention committee and the Racial Justice Act. And we're very interested to get your perspective as a former civil rights attorney, and how did that background three decades in civil rights litigate practice, and how did that shape your career and your path to the bench? Ultimately,

Anita Earls  3:28  
right? I did not start out my legal career expecting to become a judge. I actually grew up in Washington state, so I feel, I feel some kinship with the West Coast, but I from an early age, wanted to be a lawyer, wanted to do civil rights work, and came to the south right out of law school. So I was able to litigate with Julius chambers law firm, if you know that name, he argued most of the major civil rights precedents, everything from Swann versus Charlotte Mecklenburg, so school desegregation, Griggs versus Duke Power, one of his several employment discrimination cases in the US Supreme Court. He argued Thornburg versus jingles, a landmark voting rights case. And so his firm in Charlotte, North Carolina, did civil rights work, kind of whatever came in the door. We wanted to try to help those clients. It was mostly a statewide practice. So for the first 10 years of my career, I handled everything from voting rights, employment discrimination, a lot of police misconduct cases representing the families of individuals killed by police officers, housing discrimination, public accommodations, First Amendment isoto, you name it. There was probably a case at the firm, and ultimately I ended up, in my career, being in just about every type of practice setting. So I was in private practice. I was with the federal government at the Civil Rights Division. I was with a national nonprofit, the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights. I was with a law school clinic. I started a regional litigating organization. Okay, and by the time, by the time that, right after the 2016 election, it became clear to me that federal courts were at least in the circuit where I was practicing, so the South were not likely to be open to the clients that I represent. And state courts seemed like a really important venue. There was a seat open on our state Supreme Court, and so I put my name on the ballot and ran, and that's sort of how civil rights work. Led me to be on our state Supreme Court.

Tim Kowal  5:32  
Yeah, well, you mentioned a wide ranging civil rights practice, including representing the families of individuals killed in police misconduct actions, and probably early in your career, that would have been a practice area that probably get sideways glances from a lot of people, and maybe it still does. But if that kind of practice was a little bit off the wall in the 90s, I think today, in the in the you know, post 2020 that issue is very much on the wall, and I think there's a lot of people who are much more credulous that these things do happen and happen more often than we would like, than we would like. Certainly. How has Have you noticed a shift or a bend in the in the perspective of of laypeople and maybe the bench and the bar to civil rights issues over, over your career? Well,

Anita Earls  6:26  
unfortunately, I would say yes, but a bend towards actually increasing hostility. So I would kind of define my career as trying to defend the gains that civil rights litigators before me had achieved, and defend them with not a lot of success. In other words, we have just continued to march backwards. And so, for example, even in the area of police misconduct. So while it is absolutely true that the years that I was doing that work, we did not have cell phones with video capability. So you know, we never had a video of the incident in order to document or prove what had actually transpired. But on the other hand, the doctrine of qualified immunity had not advanced quite as far as it is now. You know, we actually survived qualified immunity. We only had to go to the Fourth Circuit, but in one case that I tried in federal court, we survived qualified immunity, both on the individual's liability and we had a supervisory liability claim. And I just feel like, as the Supreme Court has continued to evolve that doctrine, it is now almost a complete barrier. And so I point to there's an incredible opinion out of the Southern District of Mississippi from Judge Carlton Reeves last week, where he actually makes the case for why qualified immunity should be abolished.

Tim Kowal  7:54
 
Well, that's a is that an example qualified immunity? Is that an example of another doctrine that has. You mentioned that the that maybe the trajectory, trajectory is bending in the wrong direction. You said that the President has made it more and more of, practically speaking, in an absolute form of immunity. I know that the I sometimes like to listen to the Institute of Justice podcast who likes to talk about a lot of qualified immunity cases coming out of various circuits, and it's kind of a parade of absurdities, the types of fact patterns that they talk about. How could anyone believe that this was okay? And well, we looked at the law books and we can't find anything directly on point that says that you can't do this ridiculous thing to another human being. So you're off this time. But hence, henceforth, you know, everyone else is on notice that you can't, you know, do this ridiculous thing to another person. But in your view, are there more judges, like judge Reeves coming onto the bench, who are taking a more skeptical eye to qualified immunity?

Anita Earls  8:54
 
You know, I haven't researched it enough to give a definitive answer to that, but what I will say is that I've been very encouraged by the increasing diversity of the Federal District Court bench, in particular, but also to some degree, the Circuit Court bench and this administration's record appointments, I think is, is, I don't have the numbers off the top my head, but I think it's pretty impressive, and, and, but, and I When I say diversity, I mean diversity writ large. So race, gender, practice, background, you know, there's, there are sort of a few more civil rights attorneys being appointed to these judgeships, and so that I find very encouraging. So

Tim Kowal  9:35  
that's interesting, that you say diversity writ large. So, so beyond some of the normal, some of the usual classifications that we talk about, race, gender, but even practice background. Are there other metrics that we that we should be looking for in diversity and in the bench? Well,

Anita Earls  9:54  
I think all of the ways in which the bar is is more diverse should, should then. And ultimately, and, of course, society. So who you know, who makes up America, who makes up the lawyers, who should then feed into, who makes up the courts? So people with disabilities, LGBTQ individuals, I think, income like people that we need, we need a mix. There's real value in bringing all the different perspectives and experiences into the legal system. Yeah,

Tim Kowal  10:27  
yeah, that's only partly tongue in cheek. But you know, the bench can only be made up of lawyers, and lawyers are themselves kind of a kind of an insular group, and we have our own types of we like indoor activities as a group. We don't have a lot of people on the bench who are spouses of metal workers, welders or bus drivers and things. So we tend to be kind of a the class diversity might be tough to break when we're talking about lawyers. For example, I was looking up stats. 44% of Californians are renters, and yet you won't you're never going to find diversity on the bench, that approach, that metric of having 44% of the bench being renters rather than homeowners. So there are certain things that that are tough to find, see yourself in the mirror, or see yourself when you look at the at the bench, certain class metrics that you'll never really be able to broach. And I wanted to talk a little bit later about how you see walking the fine line between, you know, looking at the bench, at the judiciary, as something that is kind of something other and something insular that just needs to be respected at all times and then, and on the other hand, something that needs accountability, needs checks and balances, just like any other political branch or branch of government, I should say. But back to your your civil rights background. Does that background of yours shape how you see your role on the Supreme Court of North Carolina?

Anita Earls  11:54 
Well, I that's an interesting way of putting it. How I see my role. I do think that judges so in North Carolina, we are our state court benches elected, and we run in partisan elections. We run statewide. We have eight year terms, and I think different members of our court have different for lack of a better word, judicial philosophies and how they view their roles. I don't see my so. And of course, we all come to the bench with having had some kind of professional background. In other countries, there are folks who come straight out of school and become judges. But other than magistrate level, I think here you've had some kind of experience in the law before you become a judge. And again, because we are generalists here on our court, it's actually really valuable to have we previously had someone who had done workers comp cases. We had someone who'd been on the Utilities Commission. You know, to have people working in those areas of the law before they come on the bench is really helpful to some, you know. So, so I think when I came on the bench, I was the only person with a civil rights background. So when we heard voting rights cases, and we've had some loosely, what I call police misconduct cases, we I think it's been useful to have the perspective of someone who's who's worked in that area of the law, just as it was useful to have someone on the utilities commission when we would get a pretty complex case about electricity rates. So I don't know that that's influenced my view about my role, but I do think that it brings an important perspective to the issues that come before us.

Tim Kowal  13:36 
Do you find that you know, speaking of someone who has never been inside the inside the room as Supreme Court justices are talking about cases. Do those you have opportunities to bring those experiences to bear on in talking about cases with your colleagues, what I

Anita Earls  13:52 
will say is that certainly in every case as an appellate court, we are bound by the record that we are we are bound by the facts as the trial court has found them, or if it's a motion to dismiss as they are pled in the complaint and at by the same token, when we are assessing how to apply the law to any particular fact set of facts that come to us, it's inevitable that your past experiences in the law help shape some of the assumptions that you bring to bear in those cases. So and I'm sure that is true on every appellate court, that that as as colleagues are discussing cases, whether explicitly or implicitly, that is to say whether they talk about it or whether it just informs them your past experiences necessarily impact how you view how the law should apply in any particular circumstance. And I'm thinking of a famous quote, and I'm not going to remember which case this comes from, but even the US Supreme Court in the past, justices have said, you know, it would be. Mistake to have a court made up of people who have no views about the law, right? Because they kind of imply that they're incompetent, and they've never they don't know what they're doing. So we all come to it with views about the law. Yeah,

Tim Kowal  15:13 
yeah. I think it's a important, important to have views, but to realize that your view may be wrong, or your view may be subject subject to change or evolution. Now, Justice Earls, you serve on the North Carolina Task Force on racial equity in criminal justice. What is the task force?

Anita Earls  15:29 
So actually, can I just follow up on something you just said about being willing to understand your views are wrong? I think that that has truly, to me, defines humility, right? You approach this job with a sense of humility and why oral arguments are so important before, before I came on the bench as a person who did a number of appellate arguments, I was always told, you know, your brief is what matters. You can lose your case at oral argument, but you know what really matters is your brief? I don't think that's true at all. I come to oral arguments and leave with an entirely different conclusion than I walked in the room with or oral arguments, to me, are really important, and I think, and that, to me, that's indicative of coming to it with an open mind and being willing to be persuaded by the advocates. So that's I, you know, I can only speak for myself. I don't know how other jurists approach it, but they matter. Oral arguments matter a lot. Hey, can

Jeff Lewis  16:25 

I ask in your court? Or does the court have a bench memo or draft opinion written before you take the bench for oral argument? No,

Anita Earls  16:33  
we don't, and we don't assign the cases until after we've voted them. Okay? Every justice has a clerk who who prepares a bench memo, but, but we don't have a an opinion that are sick, yeah,

Jeff Lewis  16:48  
you know, California, we have, we have courts that some, some of them issue verbal tentative rulings right before oral argument. Some issue written tentatives about a week before argument. And we have one court that actually issues the entire opinion, the entire tentative opinion before oral argument. So it's different mindset going into oral argument. Here,

Anita Earls  17:05  
I hear that, but I still I've got to believe that it makes a difference to some degree. Yeah, but you asked me about the task force. So let me move to that following the murder of George Floyd and the demonstrations that happen around the country, including in North Carolina, across the state, in big cities and small rural areas, there were people in the streets demonstrating, and our courthouse was actually the target of some of those demonstrations. There was some minor damage done to the first floor. But following that, our Chief Justice, who at the time, was the first African American woman to serve as Chief Justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court. Justice Sherry Beasley, she issued a statement very strongly, talking about as a mother of two young black men, she understood the concerns of those demonstrating and that it was incumbent on us to make sure that our justice system addressed the racial inequities that we experience at the same time. So the court, our court, established a commission on fairness and equity. The governor established a group of like 25 stakeholders from different arenas as a task force on racial equity and criminal justice, so only looking at the criminal justice system, not civil justice. And his vision, the governor's vision was that we would spend six months coming up with recommendations, and then we would spend the next year and a half implementing them. And fortunately, he has given us a little more time. We did come up with 125 recommendations. We are still working on the implementation. Wow, wow. 125,

Tim Kowal  18:44 
recommendations, that's that's a lot. Can you give us a taste of some of those recommendations? Or are they privileged? No,

Anita Earls  18:51 
it's all public. There's a website reports, not only our initial recommendations, which include all of this. It was very important that they be data driven. So they all each recommendation has a you know, list of sources where we got the idea that this could be effective. And you know, some of them, many of them are very state specific. Obviously this, you know, very unique things about this state. But a lot of our information actually comes from other states as well, and we were working with three different systems, right? So policing the courts and then corrections afterwards, like prisons and what and even what happens after prison. So everything from diversion programs, a lot around the juvenile justice system, how we can improve the use of school resource officers so that fewer kids get into the juvenile justice system to begin with, to what district attorneys can do in charging decisions to try to lessen the racial disparities. Some of the biggest disparities we found were in terms people sentenced to life without parole for crimes they committed as juveniles. So juvenile life without. Parole sentences, something like 93% of them in this state were children of color. This is a state that's 22% African American, and I don't off the top of my head the other that that's the largest single racial minority group. But the So, one of the, one of the things, I think, that has been most successful, one of our recommendations was a juvenile sentence review board, so an entity to look at what has happened to those people who were sentenced to life without parole, and so taking people who have served at least, I think it's 15 years or more, and examining their sentences, and so that so the governor agree, agreed to appoint that board, and then they would make recommendations to the governor, who has the power to, you know, commute sentences or or otherwise, provide relief. And so that board has been meeting and reviewing those sentences. I think the number might be up to five juveniles have been released as a result of the work of that board. So that that's one example of reform. There were a lot of things around policing, police training, police practices, so just and then at the other end, we looked at things like restorative justice programs. We looked at fines and fees and the crushing burden of criminal justice system, debt and interventions to address that. So a real wide range. The report includes a chart that says, like, who's responsible for implementing each reform? And I would say we've certainly still got a lot of work to do, but it's, it's, you know, an effort to try to make a difference. I

Tim Kowal  21:36  
think it's interesting that you said that the this juvenile sentencing Review Board would make, I guess, use sounds like probably using data and discretion to make recommendations to the governor, who would have the final decision about whether to commute the sentences. Seems, seems hard to argue, you know, argue why the governor should not have that additional information from from derived from data and the experience of professionals in that regard, that seems, seems like a like an obvious recommendation,

Anita Earls  22:08 
well, but they were also looking at each individual case. So these are really individual by individual assessments and examinations of their record, both you know every you know the details of the crime, their role in it, as well as everything they've done while incarcerated since then. I've

Tim Kowal  22:26 
always liked the idea of having having military people, or former military people, on those kinds of boards make good assessment of what young people are made of. And if they have the stuff you know, for making something of themselves, they have to sort through a lot of different characters in the military, some who are probably thrown in there because it got to get them off the street into the military, otherwise, there's going to create a lot of problems. And so I think military officers have a lot of lot of discretion under their belt. Could be well, well deployed in a juvenile sentencing review board like that last year, Cal California created a bias prevention committee, as I alluded to earlier, and it's chaired by Supreme Court Associate Justice Martin Jenkins. And on a previous episode of our podcast, we had a committee member, Ben Shatz, talk about the committee's mission, which is to promote an appellate court environment free of bias and the appearance of bias. And part of our discussion there, we talked about how, if, if any litigant in a in one of our superior courts, the trial court system, believes that the judge has some form of bias, you know, there's a right to a peremptory challenge without cause. You just, you just submit a form, you say that I believe that this judicial officer is biased against the attorney or the or the client, and you get a new a new judge, but that process doesn't happen in the Court of Appeal, and that just always an interesting omission. But the nascent committee is looking for suggestions from, from the bar, from the bench, from from anywhere, about how to go about its mission of ridding the court of bias and the appearance of bias, I wonder, based on your experience justice, Earls, do you have any suggestions for our nascent bias prevention committee here in California?

Anita Earls  24:10  
So we had, as I mentioned earlier, our Court Chief Justice, Beasley, established a commission on fairness and equity in the courts, and they were looking at both civil and criminal court system issues, and so they had a wide range of topics that they were examining that that commission, when the new chief justice in January of 2023 disbanded, it. We also had an internal equity committee, so our Supreme Court hires at the time, so we had an internal committee just to see about what our Supreme Court is doing. And at the time that committee was operating, we got so the first step was to get data and just, you know, maybe we actually don't have an issue. Let's get the numbers and see what what they say. It showed that we hired seven, we hire 72 people, and of those seven. 72 we were doing pretty well on gender equity, but only two of the 72 are African American, and that includes our law clerks, right the people, which is a stepping stone to an appellate career. That committee was also disbanded, so I can only share the experience I had while that committee existed, and what I can my my sense from the limited time that we were able to operate is that it is very kind of location specific. So I was looking at reports from Florida and Washington State and a number of other states. You know, if you look on the national Senate for state courts website, they have an incredible wealth that is like, that's my number one suggestion. If you haven't already mined the National Center for state courts. They have some self assessment tools. They have sets of recommendations for policy. They really have an incredible wealth of material. But I but it was very clear to me that you have to kind of, there's no one size fits all that you need to do your own investigation, if you will, and figure out what are the, what are the barriers in your state? And this can be state specific. This can even be very local, local, you know, in your county. And fortunately, while those statewide efforts I mentioned have been discontinued, we have some local efforts that are still underway by local efforts, I mean, in Mecklenburg County, so that's the county where the city of Charlotte is located, they have a race matters for Juvenile Justice Project. So they have been looking at how to make the court how to how to end racial disparities in the juvenile justice system at the trial court level in that county, again, there's a there's a website, a lot of materials. They've especially been looking at the role of implicit biases and implicit racial biases. So, long winded way of saying, there's a lot of resources out there, important to tailor them to the specific situation that you're dealing with. Yeah, yeah. I

Tim Kowal  27:00  
thought that's that's interesting. This, when you say it's not one size fits all, you have to look at what, what your particular state needs, or your particular county or local court needs. What types of factors or metrics should we be looking at? You mentioned first, to get data and to look at, you know, how is your court lining up with, how well does your court reflect the community that it's serving in terms of of race and gender, and what, what other kinds of of metrics should one be looking at? And is that a is that kind of a one to one? I mean, you know, should the should the court exactly reflect the percentages in the community? Or how important is that, or is that a level of is that something that varies from one community to another?

Anita Earls  27:46 
So again, I think it's very much a kind of a local assessment. I don't think there needs to, you know, I don't think there needs to be any set, specific criterion. I think you should look at qualitative and quantitative data. So qualitative data might be, you know, having a focus group or doing some surveys, or, you know, maybe you have a little questionnaire for people who come into the courthouse during a particular week and just get their impressions, you know, what? How do they feel they were served? There's a whole bunch of different ways that social scientists and other people more expert than myself could tell you how to how to do this. I think that, like I said, the National Center for state courts has this self assessment model that asks stakeholders within the system a series of questions to get at what the how a court system might be operating. And you know, you sort of want the perspectives of the people in the system, as well as the people using the system and and I think the then how what interventions are useful will immediately become apparent when you get that information right. So, so, for example, one of the things that sparked the discussion in North Carolina was a study that our state Solicitor General did so we have a solicitor general in the state. He looked at the data the race and gender of attorneys who argue in the state Supreme Court over a two year period, and what he found was that women were underrepresented, people of color were even more underrepresented. And that stuck that and it was, it was just numbers, right? There was no normative anything attached to the numbers. He just said, we've, we've assessed, here's, here's what we found, but that the results of that research were published in the bar journal, and I think, as a result, we are seeing, I think, if you were to update that, I'm fairly certain you would see that there have been greater opportunities for advocates of color to argue in our Supreme Court since that article was published. So I would say that is an example of simply shining light is enough to change behavior and to what. Open up doors. You mean, I just

Jeff Lewis  30:01  
shedding the light on those numbers you think caused the larger law firms that appear before your court to go we ought to take a second, second look at who we who we send to oral argument. Well,

Anita Earls  30:13 
I think, I think that it created an environment where people were asked themselves, who are we creating opportunities and and potentially also create an environment where, because I think there's a number of different contributing factors, which is why I believe there's a wide range of tools you can use and but I think that another part of the issue is attorneys of color, not seeing, at least in our state, could be very different in other places, not seeing themselves as you know, sort of So that's not something they get to do. And so when a study came out saying, Well, wait a minute, here's the numbers, people started thinking, Well, yeah, maybe I should be able to do that. Maybe I should raise my hand and say, I would like that appellate argument. I can do that. So, so I think there's a number of different potential impacts, but I'm encouraged by the fact that drawing attention to that record has appeared to help, as I say, open doors and create more opportunities.

Tim Kowal  31:10  
Yeah, and following on to Jeff's point about how can assuming the decision of who is going to be arguing the big cases comes from the the partners at the big firms and they're going to send, they're going to send the traditional person that you would expect, you know, to go argue. I wonder if those kind of attitudes change depending on the makeup of the of the bench. They see that the the bench looks a lot more diverse. I wonder if the decisions about who to send to to our oral argument is going to change to to show that we're, you know, we can send people to a diverse bench who are more diverse themselves. Yeah,

Anita Earls  31:50 
I can't. I can't speak to that, but I can say that it is certainly important to articulate that value. And remember, in our court, there are certainly a number of different entities that send lawyers. So you know, half of our cases are criminal cases, and in those cases, at least the attorneys representing the state are chosen by the Attorney General's office, and the most of the defendants are represented. We have an appellate Defender's Office, no. So these are state entities making the decision about who gets to argue. So it's not it's not exclusively private bar that's having input. And

Tim Kowal  32:30
 
with that somewhat abrupt end to the first part of the interview, we're going to cut it there. We're going to pick up next episode with the second part of our interview with Justice Anita Earls, where we talk about the controversy that surrounded her after she made some comments about the diversity or lack thereof on the bench in North Carolina, how that landed her under investigation and then her own federal lawsuit. All's well, that ends well, the investigation was dropped and the lawsuit was dropped, but it leads to some interesting issues about free speech, what judges and members of the bench can do to exercise their rights of free speech without putting their toe over the line and getting them under investigation, and we talk about how difficult it is to maintain institutionalism while not remaining silent on issues of public importance. So tune in to us next week as we continue our interview with justice. Anita Earls,

Announcer  33:20  
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