From Kings County farm fields to the 5th District bench

After two decades practicing law in Kings County and 14 years as a judge there, Justice Thomas DeSantos says his experience gives him "a practical background to assess and understand the people in the cases that come before me."

DeSantos, who joined the 5th District Court of Appeal in 2018, is seeking a full 12-year term on the Nov. 3 ballot.

Growing up in Hanford, DeSantos worked summers for local farmers, starting at 5 a.m. He drove a tractor spraying fields before he could drive a car.

"I know what it's like to pick grapes in the field for six cents a tray," he told the Daily Journal in May. The work taught him one more thing: "That I don't want to be in the fields."

He graduated from the University of Southern California Law Center in 1981 and went home. "I did quite a few felony trials right out of the gate, death penalty cases," he said in May. "So, later on in my career, I was not afraid to go into any courtroom in the state."

He handled family, juvenile and civil cases and represented small cities, community services districts and water reclamation districts. He tried more than 150 cases.

Gov. Gray Davis appointed DeSantos to the Kings County Superior Court in 2003. Colleagues elected him presiding judge from 2012 to 2014, amid budget cuts and furloughs.

Gov. Jerry Brown named him to the 5th District in 2018. "I am proud in that I was only the second judge from Kings County to sit on the Fifth District Court of Appeal," he wrote in a recent email.

Labor fights in the fields have reached his desk. In Gerawan Farming Inc. v. Agricultural Labor Relations Board (2020), DeSantos wrote for a unanimous panel upholding the board's finding that Gerawan, the state's largest tree fruit grower, bargained in bad faith with the United Farm Workers in 2013.

Gerawan could stand firm on positions it believed fair, he wrote, but it "could not merely go through the motions without any real intent to reach an agreement."

A dispute over a blocked handicap parking space at a high school led a parent to sue school district police. In Wiley v. Kern High School District (2024), DeSantos held that a 2022 amendment removing peace officers' statutory immunity in Bane Act civil rights suits could not apply to earlier conduct because lawmakers had not made it retroactive.

A Kern County fire captain fared better. In Romero v. County of Kern (2025), the captain alleged he was fired for complaining that fire extinguishers on county engines were improperly serviced. Writing for a unanimous panel, DeSantos held he did not have to appeal to the county's civil service commission before suing because its rules provided no clearly defined procedure for evaluating whistleblower retaliation claims.

In September, DeSantos wrote for a unanimous panel in Stallion Springs Medical Services v. Superior Court (2026). An emergency room physician at a Tehachapi hospital was removed from the schedule after a patient complained on social media that he told her to "get the hell out of" the emergency room.

Finding a "significant issue of first impression," the court considered whether a medical staffing company owed the physician a common law duty of fair procedure before removing him from the schedule. DeSantos held that it did not because the company was not a quasi-public organization and lacked the authority to prevent him from practicing medicine elsewhere. Its decision affected his work at the hospital but did not deprive him of the ability to practice his profession.

DeSantos also sat by assignment on the state Supreme Court this year, participating in its July decision in Fox Paine & Co. v. Twin City Fire Insurance Co., an excess-insurance dispute.

His Kings County ties also affect the cases he hears. DeSantos avoids many water cases because he owns land with wells there. He nevertheless hopes to attend next year's Dividing the Waters judicial conference in Tucson, which will focus on groundwater.