In re Conservatorship of E.A. (Cal. Supreme Ct. - July 23, 2026)

It's hard (though far from impossible) to argue with what Chief Justice Guerrero has to say here. The Court holds that lengthy delays in holding LPS hearings -- basically, hearings that decide whether the individual at issue remains sufficiently disabled to hold them against their will -- may well violate Due Process, but that such a violation doesn't automatically result in letting the person go, and is instead subject to harmless error review. So no relief here, since the person ultimately had a hearing that found that yep, still seriously disabled.

As I said, her arguments are strong ones. I particularly appreciated the last couple of pages of the opinion, which I suspected were coming and which said that notwithstanding the Court's ruling, trial courts can still try to effectively police speedy trial rights by entering orders and the like and that appellate courts could potentially grant writs as well. All of which is right.

But, with respect, I do think that Chief Justice Guerrero may somewhat wrongly minimize the interests at stake here. She says that there's principally a "dignitary interest" in having a speedy trial, designed in central part to avoid "the possibility that the defense will be impaired" by a long-delayed trial. Justice Liu emphasizes this point in his concurrence (joined by three other justices), highlighting the need to respect "the inherent dignity of each person" by granting them a speedy adjudication. These concerns, again, seem accurate to me.

But, to me, we're talking about more than "dignity" here. We're talking about right not to stay locked up without a trial. Yes, that violates someone's dignity, and treats them as less than a person. But the right to one's liberty -- the most basic and fundamental of those liberties, the right not to be locked up by the state -- isn't just a dignitary interest. It's literally the most central of one's liberty against the state. It is the fundamental liberty interest, without which few (if any) other liberties matter. If the state can lock you up, against your will, without a trial, your other alleged rights don't make much of a difference. And, in the present case, the fact that the person once had a trial, long ago, that held that they were disabled then doesn't make much of a difference. Maybe you were disabled (or, in a different context, a criminal) then, but that doesn't mean they get to lock you up now.

I understand that we have pretrial detention in criminal cases; after, I might add, a preliminary hearing in which a neutral magistrate or grand jury decides that there's probable cause. That's a big deal too. But to say that you can be locked up, potentially for years, while all the while insisting that you're no longer a danger to yourself or the community; well, that's something that we see in authoritarian states a lot, and I would like to think that we're different than that. Not merely because people have a "dignitary" interest in being heard. But because that's what it literally means to be a (mostly) free person; the entitlement to actively resist a state that seeks to lock you up without your consent.

Maybe I just want to highlight, even more than the Court does, the interests at stake here. Because in my view, they're incredibly serious ones. Maybe the most serious ones imaginable, save death.