Desautels' rulings weigh deference, responsibility and litigation choices

Justice Tara M. Desautels of the 1st District Court of Appeal wrote for a unanimous panel in August that the Privette doctrine, which generally shields those who hire independent contractors from liability for workers' injuries, also protects a landlord whose tenant hired the contractor.

The ruling in Schurman Family Company TIC v. Superior Court (2026) disagreed with a 2022 decision by another 1st District division. The injured worker asked the California Supreme Court to review.

Her published opinions often turn on who bears the burden, how much deference a decision deserves and whether a litigant can turn a tactical choice into grounds for reversal.

Desautels, an associate justice of Division 2, faces voters in the Nov. 3 retention election for an eight-year term. Gov. Gavin Newsom nominated her in 2024 to Division 4 to fill a vacancy.

That concern with deference surfaced in Russian Riverkeeper v. County of Sonoma (2026), where environmental groups argued a groundwater-well ordinance failed to protect a salmon habitat under the public trust doctrine. Desautels wrote that courts cannot second-guess the wisdom of legislative choices. But the panel held the county had not justified exempting the ordinance from California Environmental Quality Act review, calling one argument "feeble."

A San Francisco dispute between uphill and downhill neighbors raised a different question of legal responsibility. In Quinn v. Coulton (2026), Desautels traced the right to lateral support to 19th-century cases and held a downhill owner who did no excavating was not strictly liable after a retaining wall collapsed. The panel also reversed his $32,960 expert-fee award.

Desautels also deferred to a trial judge's assessment of attorney fees in one of her first published opinions, Howell v. State Dept. of State Hospitals (2024). Desautels upheld reduction of a requested $1.75 million in attorney fees to $135,000 in a disability discrimination case. Fee awards should compensate counsel, "not provide a windfall," she wrote.

Her most closely watched opinion involved a lawyer's trial strategy. In People v. Midell (2025), a Black defendant convicted of attempted murder and torture argued his lawyer violated the Racial Justice Act by repeatedly comparing him to an animal in closing argument. Desautels held the comparisons were a deliberate tactic to show he could not form the required intent, so he could not use them to win reversal. The California Supreme Court declined review, with Justices Goodwin Liu and Kelli Evans voting to take the case.

The emphasis on counsel's choices echoes something Desautels said before joining the appellate court: Judges depend heavily on the lawyers appearing before them.

"Most attorneys know more about their field than the judge," she said on the Alameda County Bar Association's Love Thy Lawyer podcast in 2023. "We need the guidance of counsel, and we look to you for that guidance."

Desautels said she was so shy that public speaking was "a horrifying thought for me." She traces her interest in law partly to a Jesuit missionary great-uncle who brought people from around the world to visit her family.

"And we would hear stories, like you wouldn't believe, and the overarching theme was, how do you turn injustice into justice?" she said. Her goal, she recalled, was world peace, and "the best career to line you up is the law."

After Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service, she graduated from UC Hastings in 1997. She worked as an Alameda County deputy district attorney and later at Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger appointed her to the Alameda County Superior Court in 2010. In an early assignment in juvenile court, she helped Judge Trina Thompson launch a court for sexually exploited girls.

As a civil trial judge, she let jurors submit questions for witnesses, a practice she said gave everyone "a great deal of insight into how the jurors are hearing the evidence."