California’s new Assembly speaker, Robert Rivas, D-Hollister, shuffled house leadership in November. That means the Judiciary Committee has a new chair: Ash Kalra.

Kalra, a Democrat from San Jose, is a former public defender and city councilmember whose politics skew more to the left than his Judiciary chair predecessor, Brian Maienschein, D-San Diego. Kalra wrote the California Racial Justice Act, which allows criminal charges and convictions to be challenged on the basis of racial or ethnic bias. The former chair of the Assembly Labor Committee also carried unsuccessful legislation to create a single-payer healthcare system in California.