There were four published Court of Appeal opinions today, and one published Ninth Circuit opinion, but to be honest, none of them really struck my fancy. For example, is it somewhat interesting that the 32nd District Agricultural Association isn't required to obtain competitive bids to run the Orange County Fair? Well, yeah, I guess. To some, perhaps. But the opinion didn't really thrill me sufficiently to want to write anything about it. Ditto for the other opinions today.
So I thought about just writing nothing. It happens. Not every day merits a deep -- or even superficial -- look into one particular aspect of the appellate process. Some days merit a vacation. (Like tomorrow, I might add; Juneteenth.)
When I'm not exceptionally excited about the published opinions, on occasion, I'll waste some time reading unpublished opinions from the Court of Appeal. Not all of them, of course. God forbid.
I generally limit myself to opinions from my home jurisdiction -- the 4/1 -- and skip the criminal ones, on the theory that they're the least likely to be interesting. (The combination of the fact that nearly all criminal convictions get appealed plus a result that no one on the panel thinks merits publication strongly suggests that I can skip these.) That leaves a manageable number of opinions, so I generally check 'em out.
Today, I came across this one, from a couple of weeks ago. It's a run-of-the-mill family law dispute in which one of the former spouses files a pro se appeal. You see a ton of these. You can probably guess how pretty much all of them end up.
This one's no different. The former wife, L.R., filed notice of appeal as to which the Court of Appeal couldn't even figure out -- after some effort -- what she was trying to appeal, so ends up telling her that most of what's she's trying to appeal isn't appealable (because it's interlocutory) so to focus her opening brief on the only thing that's final: the sanctions decision. To which L.R. responds, according to the Court of Appeal, by filing "a 74-page opening brief addressing everything but the trial court’s denial of her request for sanctions under section 271."
So you can readily figure out what happens next. The Court of Appeal writes a short (5-page) unpublished disposition in which it affirms, concluding that "L.R. has failed to
meet her affirmative burden on appeal to demonstrate reversible error" with respect to the one issue that was actually appealable.
No surprise there.
The opinion nonetheless struck me as interesting for two very pedestrian reasons.
First, as is typical in family law cases, the parties are uniformly referred to by their initials. L.R. is the former wife, and K.A. was her spouse. Family law is a sensitive area, so there's no need to make full names public, after all. Especially when, as here, there's a minor child involved, as well as therapy issues involving that child.
All well and good.
But since L.R. represents herself on appeal, the opinion nonetheless includes the following line immediately after the caption: "Leila Rhodes, in pro. per., for Appellant."
That sort of defeats the purpose of calling her L.R. in the caption and in the opinion, right?
Second, the name sounded somewhat familiar, and a quick search revealed that that's because I drive by her office -- with a big sign that includes her name -- approximately ten times a week, since it's on a busy surface street that's on the way to and from my kids' school and their sports practice locations.
Now I know a little bit more about her than I got from the sign.
Maybe it's rule, maybe it's not (I honestly don't know), but when a litigant represents themselves in a case in which we use initials, my suggestion is that we maybe also should use those same initials on the "counsel" listing. That'd make sense to me.
