Newsom on Monday signed Assembly Bill 1359, which allows older residents to request a lifelong exemption from jury service simply by certifying that they have a disability preventing them from serving. No additional medical paperwork will be required. Seniors who still want to serve on juries will retain the option to do so.

The bill’s author, Assemblymember Patrick Ahrens, D-Cupertino, said he was inspired to introduce the legislation after a constituent, former Santa Clara County Supervisor Dianne McKenna, described the trouble she went through helping her elderly husband secure a jury duty exemption.

“Senior jurors are excellent jurists who can and will continue to serve if they are willing and able,” Ahrens said in a written statement. “But if they aren’t able to, they will no longer have to navigate a maze of paperwork just to opt out permanently.”

Unlike some other states, California has not had a blanket minimum age for jury duty exemptions. Florida sets that threshold at 70, while Texas sets it at 75.

Under California’s previous rules, residents 70 and older could seek a medical exemption without a doctor’s certification, but they still had to notify their local jury office in writing each time they were summoned, explaining why they were unable to serve. That meant the exemption applied only once — forcing seniors to repeat the process every time their name came up again for jury selection.

Supporters of the new law argue that having to repeatedly request an exemption places an unnecessary burden on older adults, particularly those dealing with mobility issues, chronic illness or limited access to computers and the internet. According to a 2025 report from the Public Policy Institute of California, roughly one-third of adults over 80 struggle to remain at home without assistance, and about one in five faces limitations with basic self-care.

Advocates say the change could be especially helpful for people living with Alzheimer’s disease who lack a caregiver to assist them with the exemption process. Andrew Mendoza, director of state government affairs for the Alzheimer’s Association, testified in support of the bill during a legislative hearing in June.

“This bill can help vulnerable populations avoid what would otherwise be a stressful process of gathering documents and explaining their disability status during a time of significant personal change,” Mendoza said.

Original source: CalMatters

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Beginning Jan. 1, 2028, seniors in this age group will be allowed to request a permanent exemption from jury service due to a medical condition, without having to provide a note from a doctor. The measure, Assembly Bill 1359, simply requires older adults to attest that a health impairment prevents them from serving. Those who still wish to participate in jury duty will remain free to do so.

The bill’s author, Assemblymember Patrick Ahrens, a Cupertino Democrat, said the idea grew out of a conversation with a constituent, former Santa Clara County Supervisor Dianne McKenna, who described the difficulty she faced trying to secure a jury exemption for her elderly husband.

“Seniors are great jurors who can and will continue to serve if they’re willing and able to,” Ahrens said in a statement. “But if they cannot, they will no longer have to jump through hoops to permanently opt out.”

California has traditionally taken a more flexible approach to age-related jury exemptions than some other states. Florida, for example, allows residents 70 and older to opt out entirely, while Texas sets the threshold at 75. California has no blanket age cutoff, though residents 70 and older can already be excused for medical reasons without a doctor’s note. The catch is that current law requires them to file that request every single time they’re summoned — a process advocates say can be exhausting for older residents, especially those managing chronic illness, limited mobility or lack of internet access.

According to a 2025 report from the Public Policy Institute of California, about a third of adults over 80 have difficulty living independently without some form of assistance, and roughly one in five experience limitations with basic self-care. Supporters of the new law say those realities make repeated jury summons unnecessarily burdensome for many elderly Californians.

The change is expected to be particularly helpful for people living with Alzheimer’s disease who lack a caregiver to help them navigate the paperwork, said Andrew Mendoza, director of state affairs for the Alzheimer’s Association, during a legislative hearing in June.

“This bill can assist vulnerable populations avoid what would otherwise be a stressful process to obtain documents and explain their condition as a disability during a time of great circumstantial change,” Mendoza said.

The law takes effect in just over two years, giving county court systems time to update their procedures for handling exemption requests from older residents across the state.

Original source: CalMatters

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The measure, Assembly Bill 1159, targets companies such as Canvas and Duolingo and bars them from using student data to train or build artificial intelligence systems. The legislation comes as California schools at every level — from kindergarten classrooms to community colleges and universities — increasingly turn to AI tools for instruction, grading and administrative tasks.

Authored by Assemblymember Dawn Addis, a Democrat from San Luis Obispo, the bill builds on a landmark 2014 California law that restricted how ed-tech companies could use data collected from students in preschool through 12th grade. The new law extends similar protections to college students and widens the range of companies that must comply.

“Ensuring data privacy and protection is vital to our children’s well-being, dignity, and right to learn,” Addis said in a statement Thursday. “No child should be put at risk of big tech taking advantage of their personal data for financial — or any kind of — gain.”

The bill drew support from labor groups representing teachers, nurses and college faculty across the state, many of which have long been influential donors in Sacramento. It faced opposition from TechNet and the California Chamber of Commerce, two organizations that frequently advocate on behalf of the tech industry. Neither group responded to requests for comment.

California was the first state in the nation to regulate how education technology firms use student information when it passed its original law more than a decade ago. But as digital tools became embedded in nearly every part of student life, gaps in that law became apparent. The original statute applied only to companies whose products were “primarily” designed and marketed for students — a threshold that let major platforms such as Google and YouTube sidestep the rules, even though their tools are widely used in classrooms.

The new law closes that gap. It applies to any company that knows its products are being used in schools and that markets or designs its tools with students in mind. Those companies are now barred from selling student data or using it for anything beyond educational purposes.

“It’s a good day for our children, it’s a good day for the state of California, and it’s a good day for California’s leadership,” Newsom said at a Thursday news conference, where he signed AB 1159 alongside a dozen other bills addressing children’s safety and technology use, including measures restricting minors’ access to AI chatbots.

Even with the expanded protections, the law has limits. It does not necessarily cover apps or websites students use outside the classroom or that haven’t been formally adopted by their schools — tools often recommended by a coach, teacher, parent or friend for things like sports schedules, tutoring or after-school programs.

Under federal law, companies must obtain parental consent before knowingly collecting or selling data from children age 12 and younger. But outside of that protection, and beyond the reach of California’s new law, children using technology on their own time are generally afforded no more privacy than adults.

Original source: CalMatters

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Since July 1, California has barred the sale of Glocks and similar imitation pistols that can be modified with an aftermarket device to fire fully automatically — a conversion that is already illegal under both state and federal law, with limited exceptions. The U.S. Department of Justice argues the new restriction effectively outlaws “the most popular handgun in America” and amounts to a clear violation of the Second Amendment. A federal judge, however, ruled Thursday that California can continue enforcing the law while the case moves forward.

The lawsuit is the latest example of the state having to defend gun safety measures it enacted in the years following the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre.

Several other legal battles are unfolding simultaneously. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is still weighing a case that could unravel a 2016 voter-approved law requiring background checks for ammunition purchases. Separately, the U.S. Supreme Court recently struck down state bans — including California’s — on carrying concealed firearms into private businesses and other locations, with Justice Samuel Alito writing that a comparable Hawaii statute unduly restricted people’s ability to carry weapons for self-defense in daily life. And the high court has agreed to take up an Illinois case that could ultimately dismantle California’s ban on AR-15-style assault weapons.

State officials contend the new handgun measure is not a blanket ban on Glocks, but rather a requirement that manufacturers redesign their firearms so they cannot be so easily converted into machine guns.

Gun safety advocates have pushed back against the federal lawsuit. Adam Skaggs, chief counsel and vice president at the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, said the law responds directly to a troubling rise in illegal conversion devices and homemade machine guns — including the type of weapon used in a 2022 mass shooting in downtown Sacramento — and is designed to keep such devices off the streets.

Federal data lends weight to that argument. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, the number of semi-automatic pistols recovered from crime scenes that had been illegally converted into machine guns jumped 784% nationwide between 2019 and 2023.

Original source: CalMatters

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The new mom, who asked that she and her family be identified only by their first names out of fear they could be targeted for the unconventional way they’re raising their daughter, said her doctors had known for weeks that she would probably end up with a surgical birth.

Yet because of their uncommon family structure, it wasn’t until just minutes before the obstetrician cut into her belly that the father of her child got permission to go with her into the operating room.

“They were changing shifts so we couldn’t get the right doctor,” Chloe said. “They said it was up to the anesthesiologist on the day of the surgery to agree to having two people there.”

Chloe is polyamorous. By the time of her delivery last year, she and her partners Silvia and Fausto had already endured a medical and legal odyssey in their quest to expand their family.

Polyamory is nothing new in California, and certainly not in Oakland, which in 2024 became the first city in the state to outlaw discrimination based on family structure — a move meant in part to protect multiple partners’ rights to manage a medical emergency in the hospital.

Last month, West Hollywood passed an ordinance seeking to become the first city in California and one of just a handful across the country to offer domestic partnerships to poly groups. But for now, many families still face legal hurdles even in places where polyamory is becoming widely accepted.

In Chloe’s case, she began the pregnancy process by contracting with a fertility clinic to implant an embryo conceived with Silvia’s egg and Fausto’s sperm. When it came time to give birth, the throuple had to get special dispensation to visit their daughter in the NICU.

“You can only get two parents on the birth certificate at the time of the birth, so they have to think about who is going to be the one giving the child health insurance,” said the family’s attorney, Amira Hasenbush, a partner at the boutique Glendale firm All Family Legal.

For Chloe, Silvia and Fausto, that decision also meant weighing which of them would get access to paid family leave — something California law guarantees only to workers with documented proof of parentage.

Experts say multi-partner families are increasingly common in the Bay Area — Chloe noted they were recently outbid for a house by another triad with a child. Yet without laws allowing for domestic partnerships of three or more people, they are left spending thousands of dollars on attorney’s fees to craft a patchwork of legal agreements that afford just small fraction of the contractual protection conferred to married couples by default.

“Families are becoming more and more complex,” said Alana Chazan, Hasenbush’s partner at All Family Legal. “There are polyamorous families that will essentially form an LLC in order to protect their rights, because corporations have more rights under these laws than people do.”

Poly households who end up hiring lawyers are most often throuples or foursomes seeking to protect jointly held assets, parent children in common and ensure they can care for one another in life-or-death crises.

Some, like Chloe’s triad, are all lovers. In many others, two may share a partner in common but aren’t directly involved with each other.

“Having multiple partners is a more difficult legal administrative problem to solve than just making marriage gender neutral and plugging two people in there,” said Kaiponanea Matsumura, a professor at Loyola Law School and an expert on the legal regulation of families. “That is truly easier, legally.”

Math alone makes opening domestic partnership to polyamorous relationships challenging. But the law itself is also a hurdle, he and other experts said.

“Domestic partnership was added to the bigamy law in California, the criminal statute, so there’s currently no way to extend California registered domestic partnership to more than two people,” said Toby Adams a polyamory legal expert who is currently seeking a parentage judgment for her first foursome of clients.

The state bigamy law won’t necessarily bar West Hollywood from registering relationships inside its two-mile-square borders. But it does sharply limit that registry’s power, experts said.

“Many of the valuable rights and benefits that accompany marriage or domestic partnership are state law-created,” Matsumura explained. “Municipalities can’t create that, because it’s a creature of state law.”

Other marriage rights flow from the federal government, leaving little hope they could be expanded soon.

“Marriage conveys over a thousand different rights and responsibilities under federal law, and you can’t get yourself into that with a city ordinance,” said attorney Diane Adams , whose nonprofit Chosen Family Law Center has helped author poly ordinances around the country. “I call this the social welfare state of two. We’ve privatized dependency within marriage.”

But expanding rights piecemeal creates a nightmare for divorce lawyers, who found themselves building the plane in midair with gay breakups in the aughts and early 2010s.

“People don’t live their lives in contemplation of their divorce,” said Steven J. Mandel, a New York City divorce attorney and legal pioneer in same-sex splits. “One hundred percent of the people who get married think they’re gonna be married forever, and 50% of people are wrong.”

California’s first-in-the-nation multi-parentage law arose from exactly the sort of lesbian breakup Mandel made his name litigating.

In June of 2008, an Inland Empire woman named Melissa began a tempestuous relationship with a woman named Irene, according to state appellate court records. The two registered almost immediately as domestic partners despite fighting constantly, the court heard, and during one of their breakups Melissa started hooking up with Jesus, a man with whom she became pregnant.

Their love didn’t last. Melissa got back with her ex, marrying Irene just weeks before Proposition 8 made such unions illegal. The two women were together in the delivery room when the baby was born the following spring.

That union dissolved a few months later and then, in September of 2009, according to the appellate court record, Melissa’s new boyfriend stabbed Irene in the neck while they were drinking beer in a park, landing the baby in state custody.

Melissa, Jesus and Irene sought to each have visitation with their daughter and reunification services to help them figure out a way to co-parent. But the law would recognize only two of them as parents.

After the appellate court’s decision, then-state Sen. Mark Leno (D-San Francisco) introduced legislation to expand California’s definition of parentage to include more than two adults where excluding a third would be “detrimental” to the well-being of the child.

“Gay rights were advanced through a lot of breakups,” said Matthew Goodwin, a family lawyer in West Hollywood. “That’s how so much legislation gets drafted, because unique questions were litigated.”

The current state law allows parents like Chloe, Silvia and Fausto to petition for parentage with relative ease. A registry like the one proposed in West Hollywood would confer further recognition, even if it didn’t ultimately earn them more rights.

“It was almost unthinkable in the 1980s that two men or two women could legally marry under California law,” said Matsumura, the Loyola professor. “What [early domestic partnership] ordinances did, it institutionalized this idea, it made it not inconceivable that a government would recognize a type of relationship and say it has value.”

It would also almost certainly extend access to health benefits — a quirk of American marriage that experts said lies at the heart of the legal fight over poly partnerships.

“If tax benefits, if health insurance, if parental rights were not all based upon marital status, we wouldn’t have the issues that we do,” said Chazan, the Glendale lawyer. “Pass universal healthcare, then we wouldn’t have to marry each other for health benefits.”

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“Lake Elsinore Unified School District (LEUSD) is dedicated to our mission to Educate, Equip, and Empower – Every Student, Every Day by providing a safe and welcoming learning environment for all students,” said LEUSD Public Information Officer Melissa Valdez.

“We understand that recent national discussions on immigration policies have raised questions within our community,” Valdez continued. To ensure clarity and address these concerns, Valdez said the district sent a Jan. 31 letter to LEUSD families and the school community to reaffirm established policies regarding student rights, campus security, and visitor protocols.

The letter, which Patch obtained, provides an overview of board-approved policies that can be accessed at https://bit.ly/LEUSDBP.

The policies state, among other things, that district staff must document any verbal or written request for information related to a student’s or family’s immigration or citizenship status. Additionally, any request must be forwarded to the school superintendent, an affected student and their family.

“District staff shall receive parent/guardian consent before a student is interviewed or searched by any officer seeking to enforce civil immigration laws at the school, unless the officer presents a valid, effective warrant signed by a judge or a valid, effective court order,” according to the policy. “A student’s parent/guardian shall be immediately notified if a law enforcement officer requests or gains access to the student for immigration enforcement purposes, unless the judicial warrant or subpoena restricts disclosure to the parent/guardian.”

The policy also outlines steps that district staff must take if an immigration officer shows up on a LEUSD campus.

There have been no reported issues at LEUSD campuses.

As for local law enforcement conducting immigration raids at LEUSD campuses, Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco said in a Feb. 6 video posted to social media that it’s not happening.

Immigration enforcement is the federal government’s responsibility, and Bianco said any rumors that his deputies are conducting raids at local schools “are simply not true.”

The sheriff promised that his personnel would not target schools, businesses, or churches and reiterated that his deputies would not perform “any type of immigration enforcement.”

California’s Senate Bill 54, approved in 2017, bars local law enforcement agencies from using public money for immigration enforcement. It also prohibits police from transferring people to immigration authorities except in some instances involving certain violent felonies and/or misdemeanors.

Bianco criticized the law, and said in his video post that he would “continue to fight to reform an extremely dangerous sanctuary state law.”

Two days before Bianco’s message, California Attorney General Rob Bonta issued guidance to students, families, educators, and school officials on how to respond if an immigration officer comes to campus. The guidance also informs immigrant students and their families about their educational rights and legal protections.

Bonta said the guidance helps “ensure a safe and secure school environment for all.”

“All children have a constitutional right to access a public education, regardless of their immigration status,” the attorney general said. “Schools are meant to be a safe place for children to learn and grow. Unfortunately, the President’s recent orders have created fear and uncertainty in our immigrant communities.”

Litigation is amassing over U.S. President Donald Trump’s plan to deport large numbers of people who are in the country without authorization. But on Thursday, Feb. 6, the administration sued the state of Illinois, Chicago, and Cook County, Ill., accusing them of obstructing the federal government’s enforcement of immigration laws.

The counties of San Francisco and Santa Clara in California, in addition to King County, Washington, and the cities of Portland, Oregon, and New Haven, Connecticut, took preemptive action on Friday, Feb. 7: They sued the Trump administration, alleging it has threatened and unlawfully targeted sanctuary jurisdictions, according to the lawsuit filed in the Northern District of California.

The plaintiffs say their lawsuit seeks to check the administration’s “abuse of power” and asks the court to declare Trump’s actions unlawful and prevent any enforcement.

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California would have become the first to require such systems for all new cars, trucks and buses sold in the state starting in 2030. The bill, aimed at reducing traffic deaths, would have mandated that vehicles beep at drivers when they exceed the speed limit by at least 10 mph (16kph).

The European Union has passed similar legislation to encourage drivers to slow down. California’s proposal would have provided exceptions for emergency vehicles, motorcycles and motorized scooters.

In explaining his veto, Newsom said federal law already dictates vehicle safety standards and adding California-specific requirements would create a patchwork of regulations.

The National Highway Traffic Safety “is also actively evaluating intelligent speed assistance systems, and imposing state-level mandates at this time risks disrupting these ongoing federal assessments,” the Democratic governor said.

Opponents, including automotive groups and the state Chamber of Commerce, said such regulations should be decided by the federal government, which earlier this year established new requirements for automatic emergency braking to curb traffic deaths. Republican lawmakers also said the proposal could make cars more expensive and distract drivers.

The legislation would have likely impacted all new car sales in the U.S., since the California market is so large that car manufacturers would likely just make all of their vehicles comply.

California often throws that weight around to influence national and even international policy. The state has set its own emission standards for cars for decades, rules that more than a dozen other states have also adopted. And when California announced it would eventually ban the sale of new gas-powered cars, major automakers soon followed with their own announcement to phase out fossil-fuel vehicles.

Democratic state Sen. Scott Wiener, who sponsored the bill, called the veto a setback for street safety.

“California should have led on this crisis as Wisconsin did in passing the first seatbelt mandate in 1961,” Wiener said in a statement. “Instead, this veto resigns Californians to a completely unnecessary risk of fatality.”

The speeding alert technology, known as intelligent speed assistance, uses GPS to compare a vehicle’s pace with a dataset of posted limits. If the car is at least 10 mph (16 kph) over, the system emits a single, brief, visual and audio alert.

The proposal would have required the state to maintain a list of posted speed limits, and it’s likely that those would not include local roads or recent changes in speed limits, resulting in conflicts.

The technology has been used in the U.S. and Europe for years. Starting in July, the European Union will require all new cars to have the technology, although drivers would be able to turn it off. At least 18 manufacturers including Ford, BMW, Mercedes-Benz and Nissan, have already offered some form of speed limiters on some models sold in America, according to the National Transportation Safety Board.

The National Highway and Traffic Safety Administration estimates that 10% of all car crashes reported to police in 2021 were related to speeding. This was especially a problem in California, where 35% of traffic fatalities were speeding-related — the second highest in the country, according to a legislative analysis of the proposal.

Last year the NTSB recommended federal regulators require all new cars to alert drivers when they speed. Their recommendation came after a crash in January 2022, when a man with a history of speeding violations ran a red light at more than 100 mph (161 kph) and struck a minivan, killing himself and eight other people.

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A judge halted enforcement Tuesday of a new statewide rule requiring law enforcement officers to disclose their own gender identity in reporting traffic stops to a California anti-discrimination board.

As part of the state’s Racial and Identity Profiling Act, passed in 2015, California police officers are required to record information about people they stop and submit the data to the state, which compiles and analyzes the information in annual reports. Since Jan. 1, new regulations by Attorney General Rob Bonta’s office have required officers to also notify their employer whether they are cisgender, transgender or nonbinary, information the police agency relays to the state.

The temporary restraining order by Sacramento County Superior Court Judge Christopher Krueger came in a lawsuit by the Peace Officers’ Research Association of California, the California Association of Highway Patrolmen and organizations of police chiefs and sheriffs. Krueger did not spell out his reasons in the brief order, but scheduled a hearing for March 19 on a preliminary injunction that would keep the new requirements on hold while the case continued.

“PORAC remains committed to protecting the rights of all our members to live as they wish, identify as they see fit, and to share that identity on their own terms,” the organization’s president, Brian Marvel, said in a statement. PORAC says it has more than 78,000 members from 955 law enforcement organizations in the state. The group also opposed the initial law that created the data reporting requirements, and regularly criticizes annual reports showing officers disproportionately stop and search drivers of color.

David Mastagni, a lawyer for the police groups in the suit, said Bonta was contradicting the privacy standard the attorney general had declared for schools that require teachers to inform parents when a student identifies as transgender.

In a “Legal Alert” to school officials in California on Jan. 11, Bonta said that “forced gender identity disclosure policies — which target transgender and gender nonconforming students by mandating that school personnel disclose a student’s gender identity or gender nonconformity to a parent or guardian without the student’s express consent — violate state law.” He has taken that position in lawsuits against school districts in state and federal courts.

“Paradoxically, his DOJ (Department of Justice) refused to afford peace officers these same privacy rights,” Mastagni said. He said the rules also violate California’s civil rights law, the Fair Employment and Housing Act, which prohibits discrimination based on gender as well as race, ethnicity, age, religion and disability.

Bonta’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Under the attorney general’s rules, PORAC said, an officer’s gender identity would be disclosed on a form that could be accessed by supervisors and coworkers. Those who refused to disclose the information could be fired, and those who misstated their gender identity could lose their licenses, the organization said.

If enforced, PORAC said, the regulations would have the effect of “dissuading officers who are nonbinary or transgender from joining or remaining in the profession.”

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LOS ANGELES (AP) — A California law that bans people from carrying firearms in most public places will take effect on New Year’s Day, even as a court case continues to challenge the law.

A U.S. district judge issued a ruling Dec. 20 to block the law from taking effect, saying it violates the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and deprives people of their ability to defend themselves and their loved ones.

But on Saturday, a federal appeals court put a temporary hold on the district judge’s ruling. The appeals court decision allows the law to go into effect as the legal fight continues. Attorneys are scheduled to file arguments to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in January and in February.

The law, signed by Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, prohibits people from carrying concealed guns in 26 places including public parks and playgrounds, churches, banks and zoos.

The ban applies regardless of whether the person has a permit to carry a concealed weapon. One exception is for privately owned businesses that put up signs saying people are allowed to bring guns on their premises.

“This ruling will allow our common-sense gun laws to remain in place while we appeal the district court’s dangerous ruling,” Newsom posted to X, formerly Twitter, after the appeals court acted Saturday. “Californians overwhelmingly support efforts to ensure that places like hospitals, libraries and children’s playgrounds remain safe and free from guns.”

The California Rifle and Pistol Association sued to block the law. When U.S. District Judge Cormac Carney granted a preliminary injunction blocking the law, he wrote that the law was “sweeping, repugnant to the Second Amendment, and openly defiant of the Supreme Court.”

Carney wrote that gun rights groups are likely to succeed in proving it unconstitutional, meaning it would be permanently overturned.

The law overhauls California’s rules for concealed carry permits in light of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen, which set several states scrambling to react with their own laws. That decision said the constitutionality of gun laws must be assessed by whether they are “consistent with the nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”

Newsom has said he will keep pushing for stricter gun measures.

Newsom has positioned himself as a national leader on gun control while he is being increasingly eyed as a potential presidential candidate. He has called for and signed a variety of bills, including measures targeting untraceable “ghost guns,” the marketing of firearms to children and allowing people to bring lawsuits over gun violence. That legislation was patterned on a Texas anti-abortion law.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta appealed Carney’s decision. Bonta, a Democrat, said that if the district judge’s ruling to block the law were allowed to stand, it “would endanger communities by allowing guns in places where families and children gather.”

The California Pistol and Rifle Association’s president, Chuck Michel, said in a statement that under the law, gun permit holders “wouldn’t be able to drive across town without passing through a prohibited area and breaking the law.” Michel said criminals are deterred when law-abiding citizens can defend themselves.

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SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — In a setback to California gun rights advocates, a federal appeals court has temporarily blocked a lower court’s ruling that the state cannot ban gun owners from having detachable magazines that hold more than 10 rounds.

The ban on higher-capacity magazines remains in effect while the case is still pending.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeal on Tuesday granted state Attorney General Rob Bonta’s motion for a stay of last month’s ruling by U.S. District Judge Roger Benitez.

The appeals court wrote that the attorney general’s defense of the law is likely to succeed.

The September ruling came in a legal action filed by five individuals and the California Rifle & Pistol Association challenging the law’s constitutionality under the Second Amendment. It was the second time Benitez struck down the law. The first time he struck it down was in 2017 and an appeals court ended up reversing his decision.

Last year, the U.S. Supreme Court set a new standard for how to interpret the nation’s gun laws. The new standard relies more on the historical tradition of gun regulation rather than public interests, including safety.

The Supreme Court ordered the case to be heard again in light of the new standards. It’s one of three high-profile challenges to California gun laws that are getting new hearings in court. The other two cases challenge California laws banning certain weapons and limiting purchases of ammunition.

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