Former teacher's rulings range from school safety to dependency law

When a student at El Segundo Middle School complained about a classmate's months of harassment, a counselor told her it was "just girl drama," according to an opinion. By year's end, the principal acknowledged she had "dropped the ball."

Writing for the 2nd District Court of Appeal in E.I. v. El Segundo Unified School District (2025), Justice Victor G. Viramontes affirmed a $1 million jury verdict for the student. The court rejected the district's argument that staff responses were discretionary decisions immune from liability.

"[S]chool officials owe a duty to students to supervise their conduct and protect them from harm while on school grounds," he wrote. He held that failing to follow anti-bullying policies already in place was not the kind of basic policy decision the immunity statute protects.

Viramontes, appointed to the court's Division 8 by Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2022, seeks voters' approval for a full 12-year term.

Other opinions have similarly turned on what legal rules require when applied to the circumstances before the court.

In VFLA Eventco v. William Morris Endeavor Entertainment (2024), Viramontes wrote that Lizzo, Kali Uchis and Ellie Goulding could keep $6 million in deposits after the promoter canceled the June 2020 festival because of COVID-19. The court rejected the promoter's argument that the artists had to show they could have performed despite a pandemic that had "made their performances impossible, infeasible, or unsafe." Nor did the artists act in bad faith, he wrote: "both sides took a hardline but good faith position with respect to the force majeure provision, which they were entitled to do."

That attention to how a rule operates in practice also appears in Viramontes' dependency decisions, an area he knew from his first judicial assignment.

In In re Reyna R. (2026), the court reversed part of a juvenile court order requiring a father to pay for a professional monitor for visits with his four children. The father's lawyer argued that, given his limited finances, the requirement amounted to "a no visits order." The court agreed the mother, a domestic violence victim financially dependent on him, should not have to share the cost. The juvenile court "abused its discretion in failing to conduct any inquiry into Father's ability to pay or reasonable alternatives to a paid professional monitor once Father raised a timely objection," Viramontes wrote.

Viramontes' appellate work began a few months before his elevation. Sitting by assignment while still a Los Angeles County judge, he wrote People v. Perez (2022), holding that a new law allowing defendants to have gang enhancements tried separately from the underlying charges does not apply retroactively. In People v. Burgos (2024), a divided state Supreme Court reached the same conclusion.

A Los Angeles native, Viramontes graduated from Yale Law School in 1999. After private practice, he joined the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund in 2001. He spent five years at the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission before returning to MALDEF as national senior counsel.

There he was lead attorney in Arizona Dream Act Coalition v. Brewer, which won young people brought to the country as children without legal status the right to obtain Arizona driver's licenses. "It really changed people's lives because having a car in Arizona is absolutely essential," he told the Daily Journal in 2018.

Gov. Jerry Brown appointed him to the Los Angeles County Superior Court in 2017, where he was assigned to the Edmund D. Edelman Children's Court. "I don't think these are easy calls," he said of dependency cases in 2018. "There's a lot of gray area."

Lawyers who appeared before him described a judge who questioned counsel closely. "He does his own critical analyses," Matthew Morris of Los Angeles Dependency Lawyers Inc. said in 2018.

Before law school, Viramontes taught sixth grade. Now, he has started a program bringing junior high students to watch oral arguments and meet the justices.