On contractively complemented subspaces of separable L₁-preduals

Let X be an L_1-predual space and let K be a countable linearly independent subset of the extreme points of its closed dual ball. It is shown that if the norm-closed linear span Y of K is w^*-closed in X^*, then Y is the range of a w^*-continuous contractive projection in X^*. This result is applied in order to provide new and simpler proofs of the results of Lazar, Lindenstrauss and Zippin on the embedding of C(K) spaces into X.