Feinberg brings exacting approach to writing and interpreting the law

A privileged email photographed by a Caltrans supervisor and passed to an employee suing the agency cost the employee his lawyer and three expert witnesses, Justice Aimee Feinberg of the 3rd District Court of Appeal held in Johnson v. Department of Transportation (2025).

The employee's lawyer, John A. Shepardson, notified Caltrans after receiving the email, but continued using it after the agency asserted attorney-client privilege. He shared it with three experts and at least five others, said he would offer it at trial and kept discussing it after a protective order.

Writing for the panel, Feinberg held, "Once Caltrans asserted that the email was privileged, Shepardson was obligated to refrain from using it, absent agreement between the parties or a judicial resolution, even if he believed there was some basis for the email to fall outside the privilege."

Voters will decide Nov. 3 whether to retain Feinberg for a full 12-year term. She was sworn in Jan. 30, 2024, after nomination by Gov. Gavin Newsom.

Whether grand jury testimony counts as evidence "previously admitted at any prior hearing" divided a 3rd District panel in People v. Robinson (2024). A San Joaquin County judge had relied on such testimony to deny Prentice Robinson's resentencing petition under Penal Code Section 1172.6. Although both sides agreed the transcripts were inadmissible, the majority sided with the district attorney as amicus.

Feinberg dissented, writing that a grand jury does not "admit" evidence and that its proceedings are "entirely free from adversarial testing." The California Supreme Court has granted review.

Buyers of an El Dorado County house learned after escrow closed that the seller's mother, reportedly dead of a heart attack while gardening, had, as they alleged, "suffered a gruesome, unnatural death by suicide."

After the buyers settled with the seller's agent, the trial court barred the seller's cross-claims against the agent. In Fennessy v. Altoonian (2025), Feinberg held that a good faith settlement determination under Code of Civil Procedure Section 877.6 could be challenged on appeal after judgment, not only by writ petition. The ruling took sides in a split among appellate courts.

A dispute over attorney liens on a $200,000 settlement raised another procedural question. In Jacobs v. Papez (2026), Feinberg held that the later lawyer could sue both the clients and the earlier lawyer in one declaratory relief action, rather than await a separate ruling on the earlier lien. Lien priority, she wrote, "does not dictate the sequence of adjudication before the fact."

As a California deputy solicitor general from 2014 to 2023, Feinberg defended before the U.S. Supreme Court a state requirement that charities disclose major donors. The justices struck it down on First Amendment grounds in Americans for Prosperity Foundation v. Bonta (2021).

Arguing for the attorney general before the California Supreme Court in 2019, she supported the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department's plan to alert prosecutors to deputies with sustained misconduct findings, telling the justices that "the U.S. Supreme Court has directed prosecutors time and again to err on the side of caution." The court unanimously agreed in Association for Los Angeles Deputy Sheriffs v. Superior Court (2019).

At her confirmation hearing, Solicitor General Michael J. Mongan told the commission that when Feinberg revises a draft, "she interrogates every sentence." He described her as "militant about making sure that her written work does not overstate the facts or embellish in any way when describing precedent."

A Stanford Law School graduate and former Munger, Tolles & Olson LLP attorney, Feinberg was recently appointed to the Supreme Court Advisory Committee on the Code of Judicial Ethics.

Feinberg directed UC Davis School of Law's California Supreme Court Clinic from 2012 to 2014, supervising students drafting briefs for the state high court.

"The students will be researching, writing, re-writing, and re-writing again until the brief is first rate," she said when the clinic was announced.