A bounty of appellate news today...

 Today's DJ has 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 ... 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.

The DJ also has  Removed justice, challenging witness testimony, appeals to state high court. 

Questioning the credibility of the witnesses against him, Jeffrey W. Johnson has asked the state Supreme Court to reverse a Commission on Judicial Performance decision ordering him removed from the 2nd District Court of Appeal. ... Johnson's attorneys, pointed out in a Friday petition [that] Johnson is the first justice to be removed in a case involving neither willful misconduct nor prior discipline. And he argued disproportionate punishment of Johnson, a Black man, would raise doubts about the state court system.

[See At The Lectern here. And the MetNews has: Justice Johnson Asks High Court to Review Ouster Order. Petition Says Jurist, an African American, Adds Diversity to the Bench; Commission Faulted for Decreeing His Ouster Rather Than Imposing Lesser Discipline; Says Evidence Is Slim.]

And the DJ has Court leaders developing judicial bias guidelines

The Committee on Judicial Ethics Opinions — whose members include appellate justices, trial court judges, and a commissioner appointed by the state Supreme Court — announced a draft opinion Friday that provides advisory guidelines on how supervising judges should investigate complaints about trial court judges. 

Magistrate Judge Louise LaMothe and Administrative Presiding Justice Judith McConnell of the 4th District Court of Appeal, are no strangers to these issues. In the 1990s, both were part of a task force to investigate gender bias in the courts, and spent years implementing its recommendations -- an experience they recounted in a California Women Lawyers event last week.

Surveys in July and August by the Daily Journal found a handful of courts currently follow the recommendation under Standard 10.20 that they establish local committees on bias with informal complaint procedures, while the courts that did have such committees often received few to no complaints.