By Susan Bassi, Fred Johnson and Faith Strader
Your doorbell camera caught the package thief. Your car’s dashcam saved you after the fender-bender. Your phone recorded the whole concert. But if you walk into a California courtroom — the place where a judge might strip away your children, your home, or your safety — and there is no court reporter present, the law says: nothing gets recorded. Nothing at all.
That is not a glitch. It is the law.
California law bans electronic recording of most civil court hearings. The legislature wrote it that way, and the courts have enforced it that way, for decades. In a state that leads the world in technology — that invented the iPhone, the cloud, and streaming services — its courtrooms remain, by design, in a pre-digital dark age.
Think about that for a second.
A Ring camera can record your front porch in 4K and upload it to the cloud in real time. A gas station security camera 30 feet away can capture a license plate. Your employer almost certainly has video of every inch of your workplace. However, in California,
family law judges decide whether parents get to keep their kids and how the family
home and assets will be divided with no camera, no recording and no record of what
was said.
And without a record, there is no appeal for those who think the judge got it wrong.
A Million Hearings. Zero Record.
Every single year, more than one million California court hearings end with no official record of what happened inside that room.
One. Million. Hearings. A year.
That number comes from the state’s own court system. It is not a guess. It is not an estimate from an advocacy group. California’s courts acknowledge it themselves, in a fact sheet published by the Judicial Council in January 2025.
How is that possible? Because California has a court reporter shortage and it has had one for years. There are not enough certified shorthand reporters creating transcripts of court hearings to staff every courtroom that needs one. So, when a court reporter is not available, hearings happen anyway. Judges rule, lawyers argue, witnesses testify, and lives get upended — all with no transcript, or written record of any of it.
When that happens, the people in that courtroom cannot appeal. Not really. An appeal court needs a transcript, or written record, to review what a trial court judge said and did. No transcript means no meaningful appeal. No appeal means no second chance. The judge’s word is final, and no one can check it.
If this were happening at a traffic court — a parking ticket, a broken taillight — it would be bad enough. But this is happening largely in family court. In restraining order hearings. In cases where the stakes are as high as they get: violence, children, survival.
The Fix Is Sitting in Everyone’s Pocket
Here is the maddening part: there is an obvious fix.
Electronic recording — the same technology your phone uses to record a video in seconds — could capture every word spoken in every California courtroom, at a fraction of the cost of a human court reporter. The technology works. It is reliable. It is used in federal courts, in other states, and in countries around the world.
California says no.
The law does not allow a litigant, even one who cannot afford to hire a private court reporter at rates of $1000 a day or more, to bring in an electronic recorder as a backup when no official reporter is available. You can record your kid’s school play on your phone, but you cannot record the hearing where a judge decides your custody arrangement.
Even more outrageous, California won’t even allow recording of remote court proceedings conducted on Zoom or Microsoft Teams.
The argument for the ban, advanced by the court reporters’ union, is that human reporters are more accurate, more professional, and that their jobs deserve protection. However, humans make errors, change transcripts and even commit fraud or are dishonest in doing their jobs. A fact documented at the Court Reporter Board of California.
Further, there are not enough court reporters. Mostly due to the aging demographics of the profession and the state’s failure to adopt technology such as artificial intelligence, AI, or improved court reporting devices. There are simply not enough court reporters to handle the workload and assure every hearing in the state has an official record and those charged with managing the state’s courts, including the judges, have known about the problem for years. It has only gotten worse.
California has a court reporter crisis, and the people who suffer the shortage are not the judges or the lawyers. They are the litigants — many of them low-income, many of them survivors of domestic violence, many of them people of color — who show up to court, fight for their lives, get a ruling, and then discover they have no way to challenge it.
That is not a justice system. That is a trap.
Court Reporters Board of California in Sacramento. Photo by Susan Bassi
Someone Finally Sued
In late 2024, a group of legal aid organizations decided they had seen enough.
The Family Violence Appellate Project — a California nonprofit that represents domestic violence survivors in appeals they otherwise could not afford — filed a writ petition directly in the California Supreme Court. Joining them were Bay Area Legal Aid, represented by the powerhouse law firm Covington & Burling and Community Legal Aid SoCal.
Their target: the courts of Contra Costa, Los Angeles, Santa Clara, and San Diego counties — and the law that keeps those courts dark.
The question they put before the state’s highest court is simple and searing: Does California’s ban on electronic recording violate the state constitution when an official court reporter is unavailable and a litigant cannot afford to pay for a private one?
On Feb. 19, 2025, the California Supreme Court said: good question. The court issued an Order to Show Cause — legal language for “we are taking this case seriously, and we want answers.” The legislature itself was named as a party, because it wrote the law being challenged.
Thirteen separate legal organizations — the ACLU, the California Lawyers Association, the California Access to Justice Commission, the Association of Certified Family Law Specialists, and others — filed amicus, or friend of the court, briefs supporting the challenge. Even the state’s own attorney general weighed in.
This is not a fringe lawsuit. This is the legal establishment telling the courts: what you are doing to a million people a year is not okay.
While the lawsuit has been pending approximately 3 million court hearings in California
have been conducted with a judge, a court room, a bailiff and court staff funded by
taxpayers, but without a transcript, or written record, as if it never happened.
June 3: Your Chance to Watch Justice Happen — or Not
The California Supreme Court will hear oral argument in Family Violence Appellate Project et al. v. Superior Courts, case on June 3.
That means lawyers for the legal aid groups and lawyers for the courts will stand before seven justices and argue, out loud, whether California’s ban on electronic recording is constitutional. The court could rule that the ban must go — at least in cases where a court reporter is unavailable and the litigant cannot pay for one. Or it could uphold the law and leave more than a million people a year without any record of what happened to them in court.
The argument will be streamed live. You can watch it. You can see, in real time, how the state’s highest court wrestles with a question that should never have needed a lawsuit to answer: in 2025, why are California’s courtrooms still in the dark?
Write it down: June 3, 2025. California Supreme Court. Case S288176. Watch it at this link at 9am.
In the days that follow this news organization will be actively reporting on the court reporter crisis and the harm it has done to Californians and public trust in the state’s legal system.
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