California Appellate Report

It's a rare day when you simultaneously have joy and disappointment on death row in San Quentin. But today is one of those days. Christo...

There are lots of reasons why it's better to be employed by a private university rather than a public one. Add this to the list . The Co...

Yeah, sorry. It's a conflict. You're disqualified for that . Justice Viramontes' opinion is 30 pages longer than that, and has m...

I'm 100% down for this decision . Seems eminently correct both as a legal and equitable matter. If you want to be a surrogate with no re...

This is a tough situation all around , honestly. F.P. is driving a car with tinted windows in Ukiah and leaves the vehicle to run a (hopeful...

I definitely know that the last line here sometimes appears in the opinion itself, but do not recall seeing something like this in the actua...

Stealing a cell phone from one person at the shopping mall at 2:30 p.m. is a different offense than punching someone 5:00 p.m. at that same ...

From today's opinion : "In April of 2023, the department responded to a referral that mother and newborn H.M. both tested positive ...

Maybe everything didn't go perfectly 100% smoothly, but I have to agree with Judge Collins that it went sufficiently fine such that the...

I'm happy that the case came out this way , and I think it's the right rule. But unlike the California Supreme Court, I don't th...

Masha Parvis goes to Texas to kidnap her biological daughter, over whom her parental rights had been terminated and who's with a foster ...

This is bold. You get to withdraw your prior guilty plea in California if you can establish that you didn't understand at the time the p...

Today's Court of Appeal opinion is doctrinally important in its own right, since it takes a position on an existing appellate split: ...

I have a different perspective than both Judge Gould (who authors the majority opinion) and Judge Bumatay (who authors the dissent) in this ...

Here's a good law review topic for someone looking to write a doctrinal piece: Is a legal malpractice plaintiff required to prove that t...

I think Judge Bress is right. The government wants civil forfeiture of $1,106,775 in cash that it seized from Oak Porcelli when it stopped h...

Next time you need an excuse not to volunteer at your child's public school, use this opinion . "But honey, since I'm a volunte...

Someone might well describe this Ninth Circuit opinion as follows: "Ninth Circuit holds that soldier discharged for rape deserves hono...

When you're sitting in jail awaiting trial for a serious offense, you've got a lot of time to think. Sometimes that reality is excep...

This is a short opinion . Very short. Three-and-a-half pages.  It could maybe stand for one more paragraph. Luis Olmos was convicted of firs...

  Okay, I guess . But Mr. Copeland should still give back the horse. (And if Mr. Copeland hasn't done so already, I'm bummed that th...

Unless it involves new appellate counsel desperately trying to correct the errors of a prior representative, it baffles me how someone can (...

I understand why Judges Milan Smith and Bumatay want to reach out and (entirely unnecessarily) decide this issue the way they want it to com...

If you're a trusts and estates attorney, I understand that there are many difficult choices to make sometimes when you're dealing wi...

This one is a bit touchy , but I'll comment on it anyway. Perhaps at my own risk. In the end, I agree with Justice Huffman that an evide...

Humor in appellate opinions is definitely a hit-or-miss proposition. Sometimes the jokes land, particularly if they're a bit subtle. Oth...

Check out the cage match fight between San Diego and Imperial Counties, on the one hand, and Los Angeles County on the other. Two historical...

I get everything that Justice Duarte says here . All of the causes of action brought by Siskiyou Hospital apparently fail for lack of a cogn...

Dad creates a trust in 2010 that splits his estate equally between his two sons. Dad amends the trust in 2012 to say that when he dies, one ...

It is most assuredly not a man-bites-dog story to discover that when an attorney feels that his business partner in a winery has unjustly re...

Adding $4 in fees to your three-day notice to quit ultimately proves fatal for the landlord here . Should have just asked for the $1550 mont...

I mean, yeah, sure, I entirely agree with the hospital that Dr. Lin shouldn't have gotten frustrated with an elderly patient in her 70s ...

It would be difficult to find a faster appellate disposition than this one . Petitioner gets arraigned on January 15, 2025 and is denied bai...

I'm going to start just by including a snippet from today's Court of Appeal opinion : "The California Air Resources Board (CARB...