On June 10, 2026 RBGG filed an amicus brief on behalf of legal ethics scholars in support of Manohar Raju, San Francisco’s elected public defender, who is appealing a trial court order that required him to pay $26,000 in contempt fines arising from his decision to not accept 26 new clients due to his office’s overwhelming caseload. The brief is here. The application of legal scholars to file the brief is here.
The brief, which the firm prepared on behalf of group of prominent legal ethics scholars at Stanford and other law schools, argues that Mr. Raju had an ethical duty to decline the trial court’s appointments in these cases; that the trial court should have deferred to Mr. Raju’s good-faith explanations of his office’s unavailability to take on additional clients; and that the risk of irreparable harm to his clients’ Sixth Amendment rights justified Mr. Raju’s disobedience of the trial court’s appointment orders.
In the past year, there have been important state supreme court decisions on these issues in Alaska, Iowa, and Washington. We hope the First District Court of Appeal will take the lead in California by vacating the contempt order in this case and holding that declining the appointments was reasonably necessary for Mr. Raju to fulfil his ethical and constitutional obligations.
Alex Gourse and Van Swearingen of RBGG prepared the brief.