The Judicial Council of California: The First 100 Years (1926–2026)

Leading a justice system to better serve the public and creating an independent and resilient judicial branch of government

In this Article

Introduction

Judicial Council's 100 year gold seal

More than 100 years ago, a then relatively unknown Nebraskan lawyer, Roscoe Pound, gave a speech to the American Bar Association about the public’s dissatisfaction with the administration of justice.

One of the lawyers at the 1906 convention in St. Paul denounced the speech from the convention floor saying, “A more drastic attack upon the system of procedure could scarcely be devised.” He and others wanted the speech suppressed.

Pound’s speech was rather gentle and oblique, at least by today’s standards. He criticized judicial administration, civil procedure, multiplicity of courts, delay, expense, and the political influence on and in courts, among other topics.

The move to suppress his speech didn’t work. Younger lawyers disseminated it and folded it into a larger legal reform movement that eventually led to both our federal and state judicial councils. United States Chief Justice Willam Howard Taft became a proponent and viewed a federal judicial council as a way to ensure that the judicial branch became the coequal branch of government intended by the U.S. founders.

Last century’s advocacy for a better administration of justice was reflected in a ballot argument that led to the 1926 creation of California’s Judicial Council to be led by the Chief Justice: “One of the troubles with our court system is that the work of the various courts is not correlated, and nobody is responsible for seeing that the machinery of the courts is working smoothly. When it is discovered that some rule of procedure is not working well it is nobody’s business to see that the evil is corrected. But with a judicial council, whenever anything goes wrong any judge or lawyer or litigant or other citizen will know to whom to make complaint, and it will be the duty of the council to propose a remedy…”

Quote from the article, "Serving the public and providing access to justice have been the core values of the Judicial Council of California."

Indeed, this country’s judicial council movement pushed federal and state judicial systems to become more efficient, stable, and independent. Their efficiency not only reinforces their status as coequal branches of government but also makes them more accountable to their sister branches and the public.

"Serving the public and providing access to justice have been the core values of the Judicial Council of California." These values have animated the changes and reforms advocated by successive Chief Justices and the council since 1926. They have led to better funding and infrastructure, greater consistency across the courts, and needed improvements and services to benefit the public. A stable branch creates opportunities to support innovations and respond to crises to better serve the public.

Getting Up to Speed

In its first 25 years, the Judicial Council remained “embryonic,” according to the late Larry L. Sipes, former president of the National Center of State Courts and author of Committed to Justice: The Rise of Judicial Administration in California. It primarily conducted surveys. Reforms related to the justice system, such as the appointment of appellate justices by the Governor, conditioned upon approval by a Commission of Qualifications, were led by other entities. The multiplicity of courts that Pound criticized was still intact. There were still superior courts, municipal courts, township courts, justice courts, and police courts as well as an astounding 830 court locations.

Chief Justice Phil S. Gibson (1940–1964) was the first Chief Justice to begin pushing for serious reform. He endorsed a State Bar recommendation that the Judicial Council—not the Legislature—should make rules of procedure for the appellate courts. This core function of rulemaking authority came with funding for a small research staff that was led by Bernard E. Witkin, then on the Supreme Court staff, who later became a renowned legal scholar. 

In 1947, the Legislature directed the Judicial Council to study the state’s unwieldy lower court system and to make recommendations to improve it. At the time, there were superior courts and 768 inferior courts in seven different categories, some with overlapping responsibilities. There were two different types of municipal courts, two types of township courts, two types of city courts, and police courts. Many courts operated part-time and were staffed by laypersons. “Inefficiency, waste of resources, confusion, and a fair measure of incompetency marked the system,” according to Charles J. McClain, one of the co-authors of Constitutional Governance and Judicial Power: The History of the California Supreme Court. The Legislature endorsed the Judicial Council report and its recommendations for improving the competency of the lower courts and streamlining the system into three lower-tier courts: superior, municipal, and justice courts. The proposals were overwhelmingly approved by voters in 1950.

In the 1950s, Gibson pushed for two more reforms: A mechanism to discipline judges and a permanent support staff for the Judicial Council. In 1960, voters overwhelmingly approved the disciplinary arm, the Commission on Judicial Qualifications (now called the Commission on Judicial Performance) and the creation of the position of Administrative Director of the Courts to perform functions delegated by the council or the Chief Justice. In 1961, Ralph Kleps became the first Administrative Director with the delegated authority to establish the Administrative Office of the Courts (AOC) as the council’s staff arm. (The AOC was later realigned under the Judicial Council of California nomenclature.) Voters also expanded membership to the council to include two state legislators and four State Bar members. 

What emerged from the planning and funding battles were far-reaching reforms in court funding, organization, and procedures. Those reforms became the foundation for innovations in court administration and more stable funding—for both court operations and facilities—advocated by successor Chief Justices Tani G. Cantil-Sakauye and Patricia Guerrero, and Administrative Directors Steven Jahr, Martin Hoshino, and Michelle Curran.

The newly staffed Judicial Council performed legal and statistical research. Annual and strategic planning didn’t arrive until the 1970s, ‘80s, and ‘90s. One impetus for planning was a 1974 state Supreme Court case, Gordon v. Justice Court, which held that it was unconstitutional to allow nonattorneys to preside over criminal trials in the state’s justice courts if a defendant faced a jail sentence. Kleps concluded that the consequences of that case made it apparent that the Judicial Council had to do more than report and survey the courts. It had to get more involved in improving the administration of justice. 

However, it wasn’t until 1987, under Chief Justice Malcolm M. Lucas and Administrative Director William E. Davis, that the Judicial Council more fully asserted its leadership role as a policymaking and rulemaking agency as envisioned by the state Constitution. It began by creating an annual plan for its activities. Chief Justice Lucas reorganized the Judicial Council’s appointment system and committee structure. The council identified five areas to focus on: (1) improving funding, (2) reducing delay, (3) encouraging uniformity, (4) improving public access and understanding of the courts, and (5) ensuring fair and equal treatment for all participants. 

In 1992, the council appointed Administrative Director William C. Vickrey and annual planning morphed into strategic planning. By the time Ronald M. George, who had joined the Supreme Court in 1991, became Chief Justice and chair of the council in 1996, the state was beginning to emerge from one of its regular boom-bust cycles, but the court system was still reeling from budget cuts. Chief Justice George embarked on a two-year effort to visit all the state’s courts. When he announced his retirement in 2011, Chief Justice George cited that tour as one of the pivotal moments in his tenure as he saw first-hand the effects of disparate funding. He called it shocking.

“There were counties where there were absolutely no facilities for jurors,” Chief Justice George wrote in his book, Chief, The Quest for Justice in California. “In some courthouses, jurors waiting to be summoned…would sit in a hallway day after day with barely room for people to walk by, mingling with persons out on bail charged with sometimes serious criminal offenses; rival gang members; victims of crime; witnesses; family members—all in the same crowded corridor. At one courthouse, I actually saw jurors on the sidewalk holding umbrellas, standing in the rain waiting to be summoned.” 

Trial Court Funding and Unification

Although the 1950 reforms pared down the number of jurisdictional courts in California, the one remaining efficiency reform—unification of all trial courts into a single-level court of original jurisdiction in each county—was not realized for almost another 50 years. It was endorsed by the Judicial Council in 1970 but opposed by local courts. It took another 30 years to come to fruition. The years-long effort to unify the court system ran parallel to efforts to get the state to take over funding for the traditionally county-funded local courts.

The catalyst for trial court funding and unification finally came in 1978 with the passage of Proposition 13.

Article pull quote, "Every public policy issue has deep roots for its final enactment."

“Every public policy issue has deep roots for its final enactment,” said Diane Cummins, a state-finance specialist who worked with Chief Justices, Governors, and legislators for more than 30 years. “And most state-local issues have their roots in Prop. 13, which eliminated the authority of local government officials to impose a property tax rate against the assessed value of properties within their local jurisdictions. Upon its passage, local governments—cities, counties, K–14 school districts, and many special districts lost almost $7 billion in revenue.” That’s $34.6 billion in 2025 dollars.

As the state struggled to help with backfills for local governments, Cummins said, it became clear that funding for local courts was overlooked. For the next 20 years, the Judicial Council and Chief Justices Rose Bird, Malcolm Lucas, and Ronald M. George backed efforts by the Legislature to address the underfunded courts.

“The problems were so severe that during my first year as Chief Justice I twice was forced to seek emergency funding from the Legislature to assist several courts facing imminent closure, a breakdown in basic services to the public, and severe layoffs,” said Chief Justice George.

After years of Judicial Council advocacy, collaboration, and compromise with key legislators and crucial stakeholders, Governor Pete Wilson signed the Lockyer-Isenberg Trial Funding Act of 1997. One of the key compromises to state funding was to ensure a decentralized system of trial court management. The bill consolidated all court funding at the state level, with the Legislature appropriating funds and the Judicial Council allocating them to the state courts, which would continue to manage their day-to-day operations.

In 1998, Californians adopted a proposition to provide for voluntary unification of the superior and municipal courts. By 2001, all 58 counties had unified their court system into a single, countywide superior court. In 2000, the Trial Court Employment Protection and Governance Act changed the status of 17,000 court personnel from employees of the county to employees of their courts. And finally, in 2002, the Trial Court Facilities Act transferred governance, maintenance, and building of state and local courthouses to the state judicial branch. Approximately 500 buildings, some suffering decades of neglect, were transferred to the Judicial Council. 

Ten years after the 1998 funding reforms and the shift from county-provided support to state-level support for courts, the Great Recession of 2007–2009 had an enduring effect on state budgets. Court funding was drastically cut, as were other state services. Despite the recession, Chief Justice George said, “It is readily apparent that the judicial branch is stronger, in far better financial shape than it otherwise would have been, and in the best position possible to cope with the broad economic fluctuations facing California.” 

Ongoing Reform

Despite the increased stability provided by this move to state funding, the devastating economic recession that followed in California hit all state services, including the court system. By the time Chief Justice Tani G. Cantil-Sakauye began her tenure in 2011, inadequate funding for the court system reached a crisis point. In 2012, she and Governor Jerry Brown created the Trial Court Funding Workgroup to evaluate the state’s progress in achieving the goals of the Lockyer-Isenberg Trial Court Funding Act. At one of the workgroup’s first meetings, the cochair and former Assembly Member Phillip Isenberg noted that “the constant tension remained between a standard of statewide administration and local preference to be given money and be left alone.” 

Even as state funding for the court system was steadily improving, it also revealed a fundamental problem that Chief Justice Cantil-Sakauye addressed in her annual State of the Judiciary address to the Legislature in 2016: “We have a system of fines and fees that has morphed from a system of accountability to a system that raises revenue for essential government services. For example, we raise approximately $1.7 billion in fines, fees, and assessments. More than 60 percent of that money goes to fund programs and services at the local and state level. The rest goes to the court system.”

In advocating for reform, the Chief Justice and the Judicial Council emphasized that two decades of increasing reliance on fines and fees had created a system that was both more costly for individuals and more complex to administer. The structure also implicated important public policy questions, including the proper roles of the branches of state government, the purposes of sentencing, and the most appropriate means of funding government services. Making clear that the solution to problems inherent in this structure required input from all three branches of government, Chief Justice Cantil-Sakauye and the council then worked with the Governor and state Legislature to wean dependency on fines and fees and shift more funding for the court system to the state’s General Fund. 
 

To provide greater transparency and accountability for how public funds were being used by the judicial branch, the council also increased its focus on improving the collection, quality, and analysis of data from across the court system, helping to inform decision-making on court operations and in certain areas of judicial adjudication.

The benefits of a unified, statewide system under the leadership of the Judicial Council came into focus when California’s court system was confronted with the unprecedented challenge of trying to maintain access to justice for the state’s residents in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting statewide lockdown that began in March 2020. Pivoting quickly to address the impact of the pandemic, the council adopted a set of statewide emergency rules that enabled courts to remain open as “essential services.” 

When the world and the state began to emerge from one of the most challenging health crises in California’s history, the council set out to identify, refine, and enhance successful court practices that emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic in order to increase access to justice, modernize services, and promote uniformity in practices. This included strong support from the public and court users for how Californians would access their courts, including offering remote access for most court proceedings and enhancements in the use of technology generally. “We learned so much about the adaptability, creativity, and ingenuity of the trial courts and justice partners,” said Justice Marsha G. Slough (Ret.), who chaired the workgroup of council members charged with making recommendations on the adoption of court practices that demonstrated the most promise. In many respects, the council and courts’ response to the challenges of the pandemic set the stage for significant changes in how the public will engage with the courts in the future.

After being sworn into office in January 2023, Chief Justice Patricia Guerrero cited the resilience of a post-pandemic judicial branch and council governing body that continues to drive reform and innovation into the future. Speaking about the council’s centennial anniversary in 2026, Chief Justice Guerrero said, “The council’s remarkable evolution as a unifying force for improving the statewide administration of justice has profoundly impacted how our courts operate and transformed the court-user experience. Our progress as an independent, coequal branch of government would not have been possible without the existence of the Judicial Council. Thanks to judicial visionaries, and thanks to the justices, judges, court executives, staff, and justice partners who made this possible, we will continue to advance judicial administration and access to justice for all Californians into the future.”