Justice Danny Chou, an appellate lawyer at heart, faces first retention vote

A Contra Costa County man spent 311 days confined under back-to-back temporary conservatorships before any court found he was gravely disabled. Writing for the 1st District Court of Appeal last year, Justice Danny Y. Chou held that the delay violated his right to due process.

"[T]rial courts should not consider the discretionary nature of dismissal as a license to start an LPS trial whenever they get around to it," Chou wrote in Conservatorship of A.H. (2025). The decision reversed the man's conservatorship under the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act.

The opinion pointed beyond the individual case to the system responsible for the delay. A single judge handled such cases for a county of more than 1 million people. "While we do not doubt the sincerity of individual judges and counsel in dealing with the issue, we question whether the system as presently constructed can give LPS cases the attention they deserve," he wrote.

That scrutiny of how public institutions exercise their authority also runs through other opinions Chou has written since joining Division 5 in June 2023.

Last year, he held that public school employees may engage in unfair practice strikes under the Educational Employment Relations Act. Oakland Unified School Dist. v. Public Employment Relations Bd. addressed a question no California court had squarely decided. "We fix this curious omission," Chou wrote. Explaining the court's deference to the Public Employment Relations Board, he added, "Indeed, we are not experts in educational labor relations. But PERB is."

In People v. Pomar (2023), Chou affirmed orders removing the entire San Francisco District Attorney's Office from two prosecutions involving men charged in the killing of a cousin of District Attorney Brooke Jenkins' husband. Jenkins had publicly criticized her predecessor's handling of the murder case while campaigning to recall him. Although a trial judge found she committed no ethical violation, Chou noted that "most district attorneys presumably do not ever state, much less suggest, that their prosecution of a case is doomed by their charging decisions as Jenkins did here."

His examination of government decision-making has extended to taxation. In SHR St. Francis LLC v. City and County of San Francisco (2023), Chou held that San Francisco improperly excluded nontaxable intangible assets when reassessing the Westin St. Francis. Deducting management fees couldn't capture the full value of the hotel's management agreement, he reasoned, because "no reasonable owner of a hotel would enter into a market-rate management agreement" unless it expected to earn more than it paid.

Chou, who faces voters for the first time Nov. 3, was nominated by Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2023 to succeed a retired justice and is seeking the remaining eight years of that term.

Appellate work has run through Chou's career. "One of the things I really do enjoy is research and writing," he told the Daily Journal in 2019, "to the extent that I've looked for work that includes that as a component."

After Harvard Law School, he clerked for a federal judge, practiced privately and worked at the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals before spending seven years at the California Supreme Court, where he became a supervising staff attorney.

In 2006, he became chief of appellate litigation at the San Francisco City Attorney's Office and helped establish the right of same-sex couples to marry in California in state and federal court.

Later, as Santa Clara County's lead public and appellate attorney in People v. ConAgra, he helped represent cities and counties suing lead paint manufacturers for promoting the paint for home use despite knowing its danger to young children. The litigation recovered hundreds of millions of dollars for abatement.

Gov. Jerry Brown appointed Chou to the San Mateo County Superior Court in 2017. Without practical criminal-law experience, he called his first year handling preliminary hearings "sort of drinking from a fire hose."

There, he started the Community Outreach Program, connecting residents and schools with the judicial system, and served as its first chair.