Does Rule of Law Still Rule?

Much has changed since Super Lawyers magazine began publishing in San Diego 20 years ago.

Back then, appellate attorney Kendra J. Hall’s firm was, she says, “printing stacks of paper and binding briefs with different-colored covers”; now it’s grappling with how to fact-check error-prone AI systems. Back then, trials were fairly common; today, personal injury attorney Robert Vaage sees so much dispute resolution and mediation that “it’s become a big-money business.”

For immigration attorneys, many of the biggest changes have occurred in the past year. Jan Joseph Bejar says a client with a green card since 1967 was arrested last May because of a 2009 drug-possession charge. “They’re taking people who’ve entered the U.S., and been here for 20, 30 years, and they’re all of a sudden being told they’re not entitled to bond and not entitled to be out free.”

Last fall, we spoke with six attorneys, who have been on the Super Lawyers list all 20 years, about their experiences.

Why Law? 

Kendra J. Hall; Procopio, Cory, Hargreaves & Savitch; Appellate: I grew up in a family of educators. There was a lot of emphasis on reading and writing, and family dinners involved Socratic questioning. I knew pretty early I wanted to go into law.

Ezekiel E. Cortez; Law Offices of Ezekiel E. Cortez; Criminal Defense: I fell in love with the law—everything about the court process. Especially federal courts.

Janice P. Brown; Meyers Nave; Employment Litigation: At first I wanted to be a journalist. That was my undergrad degree. Then I felt that there was more heft to being a lawyer.

Jan Joseph Bejar; Law Offices of Jan Joseph Bejar; Immigration: I was finishing a master’s in journalism and decided that was not for me. I’m a firm advocate of being able to advocate for people—something you can’t always do in journalism.

Kristen E. Caverly; Henderson, Caverly & Pum; Estate & Trust Litigation: After college, I was doing environmental cleanups here in San Diego. The job was to go out and take site photographs for properties that were trying to get cleaned up or be borrowed or sold. It seemed like the lawyers in the property disputes had the better job. 

Robert Vaage; Vaage Law; Personal Injury – General: Plaintiff: I worked as an intern for the pro tempore of the state Senate for two years while I was in law school. It was when Jerry Brown was governor the first time. Willie Brown, who was the speaker of the House, basically ran Sacramento. I realized after a couple of years that I was not cut out for politics. I wanted to represent people, not insurance companies and big corporations, and knew very quickly I wanted to do plaintiff’s work. I guess I considered myself David as opposed to Goliath.

The Big Cases

Cortez: I represented a guy who got drunk when Barack Obama was running for office in 2008. His wife, and his wife’s best friend, were raising money for Obama, and he became upset and went on a financial chat room on the internet and started saying bad things—using the N-word and “he will have a .50 caliber in the head soon” type of thing. Later, the FBI showed up at his house and he told them, “I’m sorry, I was drunk, I didn’t mean it.” The judge convicted my client and gave my client probation. Then we went to the 9th Circuit, which reversed the conviction. It used to be an objective standard. … It is now a subjective standard—because the person making that threat has to harbor that intent for it to be real. Law review articles were written about it. 

Caverly: An elderly woman who was a neighbor of an elderly man—they’d known each other for 40 years—got together after his wife died and her husband died. …They ended up getting married—a confidential marriage. People may not know you can get married confidentially; that means your marriage certificate is not available publicly. My client was the wife. After he died, she came forward and said they were married and made a claim as an omitted spouse. That definitely upset his children, who thought they were going to inherit a house. The family started litigating against her. She ultimately died in the course of that litigation.

The kids attacked one aspect of the marriage certificate. The couple listed the husband’s house as the place where they were living, but the husband was in a wheelchair and had home care 24 hours a day. So my client would go back to her own house next door to sleep. His children tried to say that it was a fraudulent marriage certificate because they weren’t really living in the house. My point is, marriages can look lots of different ways. The fact that they weren’t sleeping in the same bedroom didn’t negate the fact that they wanted to be, and were, in fact, married. But in the end, an omitted spouse’s share is a clear legal principle. We were able to convince the other side to give a reasonable settlement.

Brown: I was hired to come into a sexual harassment case on behalf of the Los Angeles Community College District, which got hit with a $10 million verdict. During the post-trial motion, the judge, Robert S. Draper, began to say things that were peculiar—about my race, about miscegenation. I looked at my watch; he asked if I had a date. I asked him questions in the process, because I thought I should make a record and I wanted him to explain what he was saying. And he felt comfortable doing it. So the record was filled with comments that he made about me as a Black woman. 

After he ruled against us, he pulled us back into chambers. He made a statement that things had changed a lot because “When I was a young attorney in a law firm, we told our secretaries that ‘You better be able to f— better than you can type.’” When he said that, I pulled out my phone and I typed, because no one’s going to believe that this actually happened, it’s just so crazy. He acknowledged he said it, but he said that he said it to demonstrate how far women had come. I’m like, “Wow, you need a new tactic.” 

A colleague argued the case to the Court of Appeals. Those appellate judges were appalled by his behavior. In March 2025, the decision from the court came out, reversing the trial for $10 million because of his inappropriate behavior at trial.

I didn’t take it personally. When I was younger, I would’ve taken it personally, but one of my favorite statements is “What you think about me is none of my business.”

Bejar: Lorenzo Lopez confirmed what the Supreme Court had said the year prior, in a case called Pereira v. Sessions. [Editor’s note: Bejar’s client, Isaias Lorenzo Lopez, had lived in the U.S. for six years—in 2008, he was served a Notice to Appear, which would have terminated his residence, but the notice lacked information about the time and place of his court proceedings. So when Attorney General William Barr sought to deport Lorenzo Lopez due to the “stop-time” rule, Bejar was able to show the 2008 Notice to Appear was invalid.] The Supreme Court said that if a Notice to Appear does not meet all the requirements of the law, then it is not a valid Notice to Appear.

I had three judges, two of whom agreed with me. The third one was not going to give in. She accused me of having a lot of attitude. I pointed out that I gained nothing by being rude to her and it was not my intention. She found against me, but that’s fine. I won and it was a published opinion.

Even though fortune smiled on Lorenzo Lopez, and we got him into a situation where he could present his case and win it, because he had a very decent case, he went on to commit numerous crimes while he was waiting to go on trial. He was accused of domestic violence. He had drunk-driving offenses. He went off shooting firearms. It was a published opinion and set a precedent and I don’t regret it. I just wish my client had been a little bit smarter and taken advantage of this wonderful opportunity that was handed to him and just not screwed it up royally. Let’s talk about it in medical terms: The operation was a success, but the patient died.

Hall: Last summer, I argued an employment law case in the 9th Circuit. I represented a company that creates video games. In that industry, you have these game testers, and it’s a transient position, because once the game is published, you no longer need the testers, so it’s not uncommon to have layoffs. Someone got laid off and sued the company for sexual harassment and hostile work environment. I typically go up to Pasadena to argue those cases, but they had a special sitting in San Diego, which is unusual for the 9th Circuit. During that hearing, which was contentious, I received questioning from all three judges on that panel. We ended up winning. Then I received an envelope from one of the justices. That was weird, because we get everything electronically. Sitting with my husband, I opened this letter, and I welled up with tears—because one of the judges had written a letter that started with commending me for my advocacy. It doesn’t get much better than that.

Vaage: In 2019, against the county of San Diego, I represented a young man who lived in North County. Somebody called the sheriff up there and they went to his apartment. He was clearly ill and hallucinating, but they thought he was drunk so they didn’t do anything for him. A few hours later, he was out in the street, somebody called, and the paramedics came to pick him up. The sheriff’s deputy swooped in and prevented the paramedics from taking him to the hospital, and they arrested him and took him to jail. He fell in the jail and hit his head on the concrete floor twice. They waited 24 hours before they sent him to the hospital and he wound up with a serious brain injury. There was a malpractice aspect to it, which was what originally got me into the case, but when I started looking at what the sheriffs had done and what happened at the jail, I decided to add them. In those days, there was a lot of murmuring about what was happening at the jails but nobody had successfully done anything about it. I tried the case against the county and got a $12.6 million verdict [later reduced to $6.4 million]. I’m proud of that case because it made a difference.

How Has the Law Changed?

Brown: Now the business is much more a business. And even though it was always a business, it felt like more of a fellowship or a collegiality. It’s much more focused on the profitability than it was before.

Caverly: The biggest change is remote work. Young people are used to technology, but because of that, they’re not around older lawyers. A lot of what we do is bounce ideas off each other, talk about whatever’s going on in our cases, whatever the court did, whatever opposing counsel’s doing. You learn about more than just the cases you’re handling through those interactions.

Vaage: When I started out, we had typewriters and carbon paper. Now we’ve got AI. There’s nothing wrong with AI if you use it properly, but we’ve got a lot of problems now. AI will make stuff up. Lawyers have gotten into trouble by submitting briefs to courts with citations to cases that don’t really exist.

Hall: I haven’t seen AI make the judgment calls to comb the record in the way that an actual specialist does. We’re all watching it.

Bejar: The most drastic changes we have seen to the law are occurring right now. Principles that are ingrained in our brains as “This is not negotiable” are overturned. The Supreme Court recently issued a decision stating that it’s OK for ICE officers to stop people on the basis of their race or their looks or the fact that they speak another language, which is unprecedented and goes back to the Civil Rights era.

Has Rule of Law Changed?

Cortez: In this country, unlike Mexico, where I was born, I was told we were a nation of laws—and I saw that for a long time. Today, I am so worried about our Supreme Court. You have brilliant judges there. I’ve studied their opinions. I don’t understand how a judge who was loyal to the rule of law and the letter of the law is suddenly twisting it and contorting it and pretending it’s not what it is. I am terrified that this country—the only country in the world led by the rule of law—is losing it badly. I don’t know how to deal with that, brother.

Hall: The separation of the three branches of government is so important, and the ability of our judges to be able to rule without being under threat is a big concern.

Bejar: I’m starting my 43rd year practicing law, and I have never, in my entire career, seen such an abuse of power, such a callous disregard to the law, on the part of the government.

Caverly: I’m not concerned about the rule of law. I very much respect our judges in probate court in San Diego. Our courts do a difficult job and they do it well. Our probate judges are trying to wade into difficult, fact-based situations, figure out who is mostly telling the truth, and try to craft a remedy that’s going to be as fair as it can be under the circumstances.

Vaage: I’m very concerned. We haven’t done a good enough job teaching civics to kids in school. Unfortunately, most of the people in this country don’t know the founding principles, they’ve never read the Constitution, they don’t know the difference between Articles 1 and 2. I made my kids read The Federalist Papers because I wanted them to understand the basic principles. Citizens United, the Supreme Court case that basically allowed all that dark money into politics, that’s a problem. It’s alarming to see masked officers on our streets rounding up and arresting people without warrants.

Brown: People are poisoning a standard of law for political reasons. That’s always been the case, it just hasn’t been so blatant and in-your-face as it is now. I was a young kid in Germany—my parents were in the military—when John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King were both murdered. The teacher was crying; I had to put my head down on the desk. We’ve had these times in our history that we’ve overcome. I’m not going to be a person that’s going to agree with the worst of us. I still want to be about what’s the best of us.