That’s one of the interesting things you can learn from the chart that accompanies a front page article in yesterday’s Daily Journal. District 4, Division 2, sitting in Riverside, is one of only two divisions to have a perfect record on the review of its decisions by the California Supreme Court in the last twelve months. The other is First District, Division 1, which had only one case reviewed. Three divisions had no decisions reviewed by the Supreme Court in that period.
While Division 2 in Riverside was batting a thousand, their Fourth District colleagues in Division 3 (Santa Ana), batted .ooo, getting reversed on all five cases reviewed from that division.
The main thrust of the story, covered by Ben Shatz at Southern California Appellate News, is how Justice Rushing of District 6 is the most-reversed Justice in the state for the last twelve months. Five of the decisions he wrote were reversed, as was the decision in a sixth case in which he sat on the panel.
I loved what Justice Rushing had to say about one of the reversed cases: “I would have decided [it] the same way even if someone had told me the Supreme Court was going to come down and beat me up about it.”
Another good quote from the article came from an appellate lawyer, Dennis Maio, who served for 20 years as a staff attorney at the Supreme Court: “If you are someone who writes very provocatively and stakes out a position, you are going to be noticed more, and because you are noticed more you are more likely than not going to draw criticism.”
For a more amusing take on how getting noticed is not always a good thing, here’s Steve Martin, in a scene from 1979’s The Jerk: