California Appellate Report

Sometimes it pays to (allegedly) steal hundreds of thousands of dollars from your siblings .

Do you long for those halcyon days of first-year (and/or advanced) Civil Procedure? Do you feel compelled to get a daily dose of Pennoyer v....

Here's a line you don't see that often : "Defendant was 75 years old when he committed his crimes in September 2009. . . ....

Judge Bea begins this opinion with: "For years, Naum Morgovsky smuggled components for night-vision and thermal-vision rifle scopes in...

It's a standard sentiment, held by a nontrivial number of people, and succinctly summarized by the phrase: "F***ing Kaiser." (...

This is a long (88-page, single spaced) immigration opinion . The majority opinion is written by Judge Paez, and the dissent by Judge Bumata...

My congratulations to Judge Nelson on this opinion . It's extremely well-written. It flows gracefully. It explains things well. It's...

I know I say this -- or something like this -- a lot. But it still seems to me like it's a total waste. The murder here was in 1978. Nea...

This is a really smart and well-written opinion by Judge McKeown. It's a high-profile case, so I won't say much about the merits; y...

According to this opinion , when a 27-year veteran judge in the Northern District of California , a graduate of Harvard Law School, was told...

I will take issue neither with the holding of this California Supreme Court opinion nor with its rationale. It's unanimous, after all. ...

Can you figure out from the very first paragraph the twists and turns that likely -- and in fact -- occurred in this case? Here's the op...

I'm not a Ninth Circuit judge, so I don't know the answer to this question. But I wonder how it feels when you write an opinion -- i...

The California Supreme Court issued two death penalty opinions today.  In one of those cases, it unanimously affirmed the re-imposition of ...

Sometimes it's sufficient to state the facts; the ultimate result is obvious. This is one of those cases. "These cases present the ...

I won't opine about the 5-2 dispute between the majority and the dissent about whether there was a Batson error here. You can read the ...

This is an opinion about accrual dates for RICO violations , but what's somewhat (very marginally) strange about it is that it seems lik...

Maritime law. You know it. You love it. That's what today's Court of Appeal opinion is all about . Loss of consortium claims aren...

I have no problem with today's opinion by the California Supreme Court , which holds that indigent litigants are entitled to have their ...

This opinion is strangely sanitized . Patrick Edward Doyle hooks up with a minor on a dating app -- she allegedly showed him a fake i.d. tha...

I like this opinion , and it has practical significance for many California litigators. The California Supreme Court unanimously holds that ...

I, like many (but not all) lawyers, sometimes write intemperate things in draft briefs. You get caught up in the emotion of what you're ...

This is an unusual 4-3 split opinion by the California Supreme Court. Unlike the United States Supreme Court, you don't routinely see s...

The defendant here is charged with felony burglary and receives mental health diversion for alleged PTSD despite having 19 different felony...

What you know from reading this opinion is that Russell McAllister was sentenced to 75 years in prison for first-degree murder of another i...

Sometimes courts get too aggressive in finding an error to be harmless. Not here . "On a late January evening in 2023, around 1:20 a.m....

If you know anything about the relationship between the Hispanic and African-American gangs in Riverside, you'll know they're . . . ...

It's an easy lesson, but one that perhaps bears mention: Don't send an email to the FBI that says "I WILL UNABOMB THE LOS ANGEL...

I would like everyone to know that I've recently had some substantial religious revelations. So while I might have been willing to do a ...

It's hard (though far from impossible) to argue with what Chief Justice Guerrero has to say here. The Court holds that lengthy delays in...

Today's Ninth Circuit opinion is fairly high profile, so it'll get a tolerable amount of mention in the legal press already. But I n...

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...