California Appellate Report

Martin wins in the California Supreme Court!  No, wait.  Martin loses in the California Supreme Court!  Oh.  Martin wins! It's confusi...

I wish this one had remained unpublished .  Or, better yet, had been decided the other way. It's not that Justice Hull necessarily ana...

It's hard to know who to root for it this one. Do you root for the plainitiff, John Rezner?  He's a rich co-founder of Yahoo! (who...

Let's ring in the holiday with a welcome to the newest member of the Ninth Circuit:  Judge Mary Murguia, who was confirmed last week .  ...

Judges don't have to be unnecessarily harsh.  Or even harsh at all.  Here's a case in point .  In which Judge Kleinfeld says: ...

I'm not going to claim that I totally understand California's vindictive prosecution jurisprudence.  I know a little bit about the U...

Can a rape be committed "for the benefit of" a street gang?  I wouldn't have normally thought so.  Nor do Justices Werdegar an...

Never, ever, ever -- ever -- respond to an e-mail about some purported moneymaking scheme.  Never send money overseas to someone you don...

I guess if you're going to lose your million-dollar-plus default judgment, it's at least nice that Judge McKeown lets you down easi...

Assume that I call you a racist.  Is that defamatory?  Remember:  Truth is a defense. Let's be more concrete.  Assume you run a compan...

I was on a plane and out-and-about nearly all day, but when I returned to the intertube this evening, I saw this case .  Which made me feel ...

Look, Alex, I'm with you.  Seriously.  I too don't like it when the government files criminal charges against someone who's not ...

Judge Bea understands how difficult it is sometimes to come up with the first paragraph of a petition for certiorari.  So he helps the defen...

I just stepped off a plane at SFO, am giving a talk today (alongside Gerald Uelmen and Justice Grodin) on the legacy of Chief Justice George...

I'm utterly fascinated by this one . It's a tax opinion.  So you wouldn't initially think it likely to result even in interest...

You've gotta have phys ed.  At least for 20 minutes a day. That's what the statute says.  That's what the Court of Appeal righ...

You'd think it was an easy case. Eduardo Lopez-Velasquez gets deported in 1994 at a group proceeding in which he wasn't advised of...

I'm writing my Civil Procedure exam today.  Or at least I'm supposed to be writing it.  It was due on Friday.  Instead, I'm read...

Here's a neat little puzzle. It's a three-judge panel, and all of its members are Ninth Circuit judges.  An opinion gets written, ...

It was true in the twentieth century.  It's true in the twenty-first.  Barring an economic castastophe, it's always going to be tru...