California Appellate Report

The success rate for asylum petitions from citizens of Mexico is strikingly low. It remains to be seen if the petitioner here will ultimatel...

This one took a long time. It's an appeal in a criminal case that was filed in 2023. The oral argument was in September 2024, and the pa...

In today's opinion , the Ninth Circuit vacates two counts of interstate solicitation in a murder-for-hire plot, for which the defendant ...

Let me see if I have this right. A married couple has a trust in which they've placed all their community property, but then -- after 48...

It's the summer doldrums on the California appellate side, so there hasn't been much for a bit. Today does, however, see this opinio...

" It is ordered that the opinion filed herein on June 4, 2026 be modified as follows: on page 9 in the last paragraph, second sentence...

This opinion certainly meets the criteria for (admittedly belated) publication. In 2002, a then-15 years old gets convicted of (alongside h...

Oops .

I wish I could recommend an opinion today that was profoundly worth general reading, but no such luck (at least yet). In the meantime, if yo...

There's good news for Quindale Powell in this opinion . Though admittedly not much. In 2008, he's sentenced to 50 years to life for ...

Did it really make sense for the San Francisco District Attorney's Office to bring this appeal? It's a high-profile matter, and invo...

The practical import of today's opinion by the Court of Appeal is both important and easy to spell out: Don't represent multiple pl...

Police officers have a warrant to arrest a guy named Delgadillo. Based on something (unstated), they think he might be in a particular hotel...

Here's a classic California opinion . A lot of briefing in the trial court. An appeal, with counsel for both the government and for both...

Do you think the Court of Appeal pays slightly more attention to a personal jurisdiction disputes when one of the parties in Brad Pitt, and ...

It's always nice when the holding of a case is cogently summarized in its first couple of paragraphs, and that happens here : "In a...

Imagine that you're an attorney representing a corporation and defending a wage and hour class action in the Central District of Califor...

After a relatively long period of inactivity, the California Court of Appeal gets back into the game today with several published opinions. ...

It has been nearly a week since the Court of Appeal has issued a published opinion, so I was glad to read this one by Justice Richman today ...

No one likes to get sanctioned. No one likes to have their name sullied in public, or be compelled to pay $5,000 to the other side and anoth...

The Court of Appeal decided to publish this (originally unpublished) opinion, which means that the following opening paragraph now gets to ...

The Court of Appeal amends its opinion, inter alia, to add the following footnote (emphasis in original): "The trial court’s math appe...

A guy who owns a house dies intestate. No one else is on the deed, and no one claims the house. Vagrants (predictably) take it over, and it ...

There hasn't been a ton of interesting action in the Ninth Circuit or California Court of Appeal lately, but I've been thinking a li...

There we no published opinions yesterday, but on a different website, the Ninth Circuit issued this Order , which identified a judicial misc...

It doesn't particularly bother me when death penalty opinions recite the facts of the underlying crimes in death penalty cases even thou...

I mean, I get it. Appellate courts don't typically reconsider a jury's allocation of fault. It's a fact issue. Which is why the ...

The Court of Appeal holds today that when a boat engine manufacturer warranties the boat engine and then replaces the engine when that engi...

I normally don't discuss many of the "AI hallucination" opinions that regularly come down these days. For one thing, they'...

This is a very professorial opinion by Judge Bress . It's got a lot of detailed introductory material regarding the discovery process in...

Were there four different published opinions from the California Supreme Court today, involving five different individuals sentenced to deat...

The California Supreme Court may have approved it in prior cases, but (unsurprisingly) holds today that under the Racial Justice Act, using...

Finally. I have long been a critic -- like many others -- of blanket 170.6 peremptory challenges. They're bad for all the usual reasons;...

This one took a while to resolve . I wonder how it would have turned out if it had taken longer. There's an oil company that wants to ke...

There were no published opinions yesterday, but there are some good ones today. I'm also in Iceland on a family vacation, so my posts ma...