Bakersfield College held its 112th Commencement Ceremony Friday night at Memorial Stadium. More than 3,100 graduates were eligible to cross the stage this year, with about 1,200 transferring to Cal State Bakersfield this fall and 26 graduating with bachelor’s degrees.…Read more

The residents of Brighton Park, a gated, 55-and-over neighborhood in northwest Bakersfield, say they’re making a simple request: that the city enforce its existing building codes.Read more

The discord that has rattled Tejon Ranch Co. over the last two years seemed to subside this week with company shareholders voting to approve every item put before them during the company’s annual meeting Wednesday in Lebec.Read more

As elections draw nearer it’s not unusual to see campaigns begin slinging some mud. Add big money to the mix and things can get even murkier.Read more

Yesterday’s opinion in Jules v. Andre Balazs Properties firmly validated the authority of federal courts to enforce arbitration awards made in cases already pending in federal court. The case is important for the practice of arbitration because it follows directly from a 2022 decision called Badgerow v Walters, in which the court held that federal courts won’t entertain a freestanding suit under the Federal Arbitration Act to confirm (or vacate) an arbitration award. As the court has now made clear, federal courts have the ability to confirm and enforce arbitration relief in cases for which federal jurisdiction was available for the original dispute.Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s opinion for a unanimous court is strongly written and unqualified in her conclusion. She starts by situating this particular dispute in the overall setting of FAA litigation. As she says, a motion under the FAA “can arrive in federal court in one of two ways. Sometimes (like in this case), an FAA motion arises in a pre-existing lawsuit.” Here, for example, Jules sued his former employer raising a variety of employment discrimination claims; some of those claims rested on federal law and so permitted him to bring that suit in federal court. The FAA came into it when the employer (Balazs) filed a motion under the FAA to compel Jules to resolve the dispute in arbitration.Sotomayor goes on to explain that “[i]n other cases, a ‘freestanding’ FAA motion can arrive in federal court outside of any pre-existing federal case.” Those cases, she notes, present a problem because the FAA is “something of an anomaly” in that it “is a federal statute that provides federal standards [but] ‘does not itself create federal jurisdiction.’” She then summarized the “two prior cases [in which the] Court has addressed how to assess jurisdiction over FAA motions filed as ‘freestanding’ actions in federal court.” The first, 2009’s Vaden v Discover Bank, presented a motion under Section 4 of the FAA to compel arbitration. In that context, “the Court held that … courts … assess jurisdiction by ‘looking through’ a motion to compel arbitration to the underlying dispute.” Only if federal courts would have had jurisdiction over litigation to resolve the underlying dispute – typically because the case raised a federal question or were from different states – would the federal court have jurisdiction over the freestanding Section 4 motion. The second was Badgerow, discussed above, a case involving motions to confirm or vacate arbitral awards under Sections 9 and 10 of the FAA. As mentioned above, because those motions alone presented no basis for federal jurisdiction, the Supreme Court rejected federal jurisdiction over the matter.For Sotomayor, the “pre-existing jurisdiction over claims” that gave the district court federal jurisdiction over this case in the first instance left Vaden and Badgerow largely irrelevant. “To start,” she emphasized,assessing jurisdiction over a § 9 or § 10 motion in a case originally filed in federal court does not require ‘looking through’ the filed action. Instead, the court may assess its jurisdiction by looking at the suit that is already before it. … Here, the District Court had original jurisdiction … over Jules’s federal claims.For Sotomayor, because “[n]othing in the FAA eliminated that jurisdiction while the parties arbitrated, … when the parties returned to court after arbitration with § 9 and § 10 motions, the court had the same ‘jurisdiction to decide the case,’ and thus ‘jurisdiction to decide those motions,’ that it possessed from the start.”Sotomayor acknowledged “that, by the time the parties filed the §9 and §10 motions here, the arbitrator had issued an award that marked ‘a contractual resolution of the parties’ dispute,’” but for her that only underscored the case for federal jurisdiction over those motions: “Those motions required the District Court to assess whether there were grounds to vacate the award,” and they “were thus integral to determining whether the award would continue to serve as a valid defense to the original claims that had been stayed, but were still pending … until the court confirmed the award.”She closes with an emphatic summary: “[T]he question [here] is [] whether there is anything in the FAA that precludes the normal operation of federal jurisdiction regarding live claims that are still pending before a federal court. There is not.”Read more

The Supreme Court on Friday evening turned down a request by Virginia’s attorney general and other Virginia Democrats to allow the state to use a new congressional map, which would have been expected to strongly favor Democrats, in the 2026 elections.The denial came in a brief, unsigned order sent to reporters at 6:30 p.m. EDT on Friday – just 15 minutes after the court’s Public Information Office distributed the reply filed by Jay Jones, the Virginia attorney general, and Democratic legislators.There were no public dissents from the order. The effects of the court’s order are likely relatively minimal, because Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger had already indicated earlier this week that the state would not use the 2026 map in the upcoming elections.Jones and the other Virginia Democrats came to the Supreme Court on Monday, asking the justices to block a May 8 ruling by the Virginia Supreme Court that invalidated an amendment to the Virginia Constitution allowing the state’s Legislature to enact a new congressional map.The Virginia General Assembly had adopted the new map in February. But before the state could actually use the map, it needed the state’s voters to approve an amendment to the Virginia constitution that would give the General Assembly the power to draw a new congressional map outside of the normal cycle following the decennial census. In April, voters approved an amendment to the state’s constitution that gave the General Assembly the power to do so. Nevertheless, a divided Virginia Supreme Court struck that amendment down on the ground that the Legislature had not followed the correct procedures when it put the new amendment on the ballot. The majority explained that under the state constitution, the Legislature must approve a proposed amendment to the constitution during two different legislative sessions, which must be separated by an election to the General Assembly’s House of Delegates. Although the Legislature had voted on the proposed amendment for the first time on Oct. 31, 2025, the majority said, more than 1.3 million votes had already been cast by then – and, therefore, “the General Assembly passed the proposed constitutional amendment for the first time well after voters had begun casting ballots during the 2025 general election.”In their filing on Monday asking the justices to step in, Jay and the Virginia Democrats argued that the Virginia Supreme Court’s ruling “overthrows [a] democratic outcome just days before the Commonwealth must begin its preparations to administer the 2026 midterm election.” Moreover, they contended, the dispute implicates “two critical issues of federal law” – the meaning of the term “election” under federal law, and the idea that the state court so “impermissibly transgressed the ordinary bounds of judicial review” that its ruling should be reversed.The Republican legislators (along with an election official and two individual voters) who challenged the new map countered that the request to block the state supreme court’s ruling was “extraordinary.” They emphasized that the case involved “state courts applying state law to hold state actors accountable” – and is thus not one in which the U.S. Supreme Court should intervene. To the extent that Jones and the Democrats now argue that the case involves federal issues, they added, the U.S. Supreme Court should not consider them because they did not raise those issues until they reached the Supreme Court.In a filing on Friday afternoon, Jones and the Democrats pushed back, telling the justices (among other things) that “Spanberger’s candid acknowledgment of where things presently stand, which is not part of the record, does not foreclose this Court from acting.” Instead, they argued, her comments merely indicated that “the Commonwealth will conduct its elections in the manner the law requires, and this Court’s intervention will inform that conduct.”Soon after the filing was submitted on Friday, the court denied the request by Jones and the Virginia Democrats without comment.Read more

Justice Clarence Thomas on Thursday afternoon spoke on the issue of shared national values. In an appearance at a conference outside Miami for judges and lawyers from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, which includes Alabama, Florida, and Georgia, Thomas described growing up in Georgia during segregation and said that “we shared a country, no matter how badly we were treated, with our fellow citizens.”Thomas was interviewed for over an hour by Kasdin Mitchell, a former clerk who was recently nominated to serve as a federal judge in Texas. Mitchell asked Thomas to discuss remarks that he had made last month at the University of Texas to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.Thomas emphasized that the ideals outlined in the Declaration of Independence provide common ground for everyone in the United States. “We have different religions, we live in different places,” he said, but what do we have in common? “We can say this is something that we all treasure and we all agree on.” Even under segregation, he continued, we had that: as a child, he said, we “raised the flag everyday” and “said the Pledge of Allegiance.”In response to a question from Mitchell about what it means for rights to be self-evident, Thomas suggested that “we’ve disenfranchised most people” with discussions of legal theories like textualism and originalism – the principles that laws should be interpreted based only on the plain meaning of the text, and that the Constitution should be interpreted according to how it would have been understood when it was enacted. “Most people don’t understand those,” Thomas said. Instead, he explained, “we were taught from the cradle that we were equal in God’s eyes. … We could own property.” “Others may intrude upon those rights … but it was not theirs to take away.” He concluded, “Even people who are unlettered when I grew up took it as a given that in God’s eyes we were equal.”Noting that he had only planned to live in Washington, D.C., for two years but had stayed on for more than four decades, Thomas suggested that in Washington and other places many people fall short of the ideals outlined in the Declaration of Independence. These people, he said, “make promises and platitudes,” “but when it’s time to actually have courage … they fail or they find a reason or an excuse” not to act. He compared them (unfavorably) with the signers of the Declaration of Independence – who, he said, “put their names down” and “sealed their fate by signing” the document, because they faced the possibility that they could be hung for treason.Mitchell noted that last week Thomas became the second-longest serving justice (and in two years could become the longest-serving justice). Thomas responded wryly, “Thanks for letting me know that.”As he has in previous public appearances, Thomas expressed nostalgia for earlier iterations of the Supreme Court, telling Mitchell that “it’s a different court now” and he was “really grateful I had an opportunity to be on the court that I joined.” When he joined the Supreme Court in 1991, he said, the court included several members of the “greatest generation” – the cohort born during the first quarter of the 20th century. “Most of them had been in the military” and “lived through the depression. They thought the institution” of the Supreme Court and “the Constitution were much bigger than they were,” Thomas stressed. Thomas indicated that during that era, “the friendships were much, much deeper than” they are now, adding that “I came of age on that court.” He had just turned 43 when he was confirmed, while some of his colleagues at the time “had children older than I was and yet they treated me very fairly.”By contrast, he continued, he had known “the last four members of the current court” – Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett, and Ketanji Brown Jackson – when they served as law clerks at the court, while he was a sitting justice. “The relationships are different,” Thomas said, “even though they are not negative in any way.”Thomas addressed his increased participation in oral arguments after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, which prompted the court to switch at first to telephone arguments, in which each justice took turns asking questions. When the justices returned to the courtroom in September 2022, they reinstated the “free for all” questioning that they had used before the pandemic, but they now follow it up with a “round robin” round of questions in which each justice has a chance to ask questions without interruption from the other justices. Before the pandemic, Thomas rarely asked questions – even though, as Mitchell told the audience, his clerks were instructed to provide possible questions with each memorandum that they prepared before oral arguments.Thomas said that the “round robin” questioning during the pandemic “brought an order to the process.” Before the pandemic, he believed that the myriad interruptions were “rude and I said so.” He expressed satisfaction with the current set-up for oral arguments, which can often go well over the hour normally allotted. He said that “the current approach may run on a bit long, but you cannot say you have not had a chance to say your piece. … I can sit there all day.”Thomas also discussed his hiring of law clerks and his efforts to hire clerks from a variety of law schools outside of the Ivy League. He said proudly that he had had law clerks “from each of the flagship law schools in the” 11th Circuit – the University of Florida, the University of Georgia, and the University of Alabama. “I think there’s smart kids a lot of places,” he said, adding that he had “a young woman coming” to start as a law clerk “who started in community college” because of financial and family circumstances. “I like kids from regular backgrounds,” he said, with “parents who worry about the mortgage and fixing the transmission on the car.”Read more