Price v. Diab (9th Cir. - July 13, 2026)

It's the summer doldrums on the California appellate side, so there hasn't been much for a bit. Today does, however, see this opinion by the Ninth Circuit, and I appreciated what Judge Bress did here.

It would have been easy to simply reverse in a brief unpublished memorandum disposition, or to reverse with some skimpy analysis. But Judge Bress doesn't take the absurdly easy route. His opinion is relatively  short -- ten pages -- but it takes the issues seriously, and then adds something helpful at the end.

It's an Americans with Disabilities Act case filed by a high-frequency litigant, so the defendant (potentially very smartly) doesn't even respond to the complaint and lets his default be taken. As a result, the plaintiff gets injunctive relief -- an order to comply with the ADA -- but nothing else. The district court is clearly not psyched by the plaintiff's tactics, so doesn't award even a penny of fees, despite the somewhat small amount ($9,364) requested by plaintiff. The district court's theory was that since all that the plaintiff got was an order that required defendant to comply with an already-existing law, she wasn't a prevailing party at all, since nothing changed.

Judge Bress disagrees, and he's right. The judgment changes the situation of the parties. The injunction makes it much easier to actually enforce the ADA (with contempt), and that rightly counts as "winning" under the ADA. You're a prevailing party. The analysis by Judge Bress on this point is cogent and compelling.

Then, at the end, Judge Bress adds a tangential discussion about fees, and I think it's a helpful one. Not only in this case, but in cases generally. He writes:

"To the extent Price asks us to rule on the amount of fees she should receive, we leave that determination for the district court in the first instance. But to provide guidance to the district court and Price on remand, we make a brief observation on one argument that Price advances in this court.

The district court found that even if Price were a prevailing party, her counsel “would not be entitled to the unreasonable amount that they request.” Price, 761 F. Supp. 3d at 1290. The court noted that Price’s fee motion appeared to be “recycled . . . nearly whole-cloth from another recent case” her attorneys had filed. Id. at 1289. As a result, the motion had copy-paste errors, did not reflect the procedural history of the case, and used incorrect male pronouns for Ms. Price. Price’s counsel does not dispute reusing a template from a prior case. But in briefing before this court, counsel characterizes the errors the district court identified as “irrelevant editing mistakes that would have required additional billable time to address.” 

It should go without saying that the issues the district court identified are not “irrelevant editing mistakes,” but instead reflect a lack of diligence. Sound lawyering (of course) includes making sure that the fee motion papers pertain to the case at issue. Courts consider the “[q]uality of representation” when determining a reasonable fee award. Van Gerwen v. Guar. Mut. Life Co., 214 F.3d 1041, 1046 (9th Cir. 2000). And we have affirmed that in “a ‘straightforward’ ADA case with boilerplate pleadings, minimal legal complexity, and little in the way of difficult fact discovery,” a reduction in fees can be justified, particularly when the case involves a “serial” plaintiff and a “lack of meaningful opposition” by the defendant. Shayler v. 1310 PCH, LLC, 51 F.4th 1015, 1017, 1021 (9th Cir. 2022).

The district court’s concerns with Price’s lawyering and the quality of the fee petition may appropriately factor into any fee award determination. But because the district court did not reach what a reasonable fee award would be, we remand for the court to address that issue." 

Nice finish.

People v. Sacco (Cal. Ct. App. - July 8, 2026)

"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 delete 'witness' and replace with 'victim'."

Yep. Those are indeed different.

People v. Garner (Cal. Ct. App. - July 8, 2026)

This opinion certainly meets the criteria for (admittedly belated) publication.

In 2002, a then-15 years old gets convicted of (alongside his 18-year old accomplice) "robb[ing] the victim and her boyfriend, kidnapp[ing] the victim at gunpoint, and t[aking] turns raping her." He gets sentenced to 50 years in prison.

In 2024, the defendant (Jarvis Garner) petitions to be resentenced on the ground that his 50-year sentence is equivalent to life without parole (LWOP) since "the average age of death for a California inmate is 54 years" and, in any event, the average life expectancy of a Black Californian is 74.6 years. So, he says, his sentence is functionally equivalent to life in prison forever.

The California Attorney General . . . agrees.

Even though the trial court denied the petition, on appeal, the California Attorney General confesses error and says that, yes, the sentence here equivalent to LWOP.

The Court of Appeal is not particularly thrilled with that concession. It allows the District Attorney of San Joaquin County -- the party that opposed the petition in the trial court -- to appear as amicus curiae and oppose the grant of relief.

The panel ends up agreeing with the San Joaquin DA and rejects the Attorney General's concession.

The sentence is not equivalent to LWOP, the Court of Appeal holds, because (1) the panel refuses to accept the statistical evidence since the trial court didn't make a factual finding about it (weak sauce, in my view, but perhaps doctrinally accurate), and (2) even if all that's true, under current law, Mr. Garner is eligible for a parole hearing after 15 years in prison, so it's not LWOP, since he has a chance to potentially get out.

Most interesting to me is the fact that the California Attorney General conceded the point. (Second most interesting is that the Court of Appeal rejects that concession.) The concession may tell you something about the general approach of the current California Attorney General (Rob Bonta) -- one with which different people might stridently agree or disagree.

PWGG v. Bonta (9th Cir. - July 6, 2026)

Oops.

Doe v. Marysville Joint USD (Cal. Supreme Ct. - July 2, 2026)

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 you want to read something extremely erudite -- yet exhaustively boring -- here's an intricate civil procedure opinion by Justice Evans that should have you riveted. So long as you are hugely fascinated by the intersection of federalism and the Supreme Court's collateral estoppel jurisprudence as applied to the ostensibly procedural federal two-dismissal rule.

Engrossing indeed.

People v. Powell (Cal. Ct. App. - June 30, 2026)

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 murder. In 2024, he files a motion in the trial court that says that his sentence contains mistakes. The trial court agrees in part, and gives Mr. Powell . . . two more days of custody credit.

That's something, I guess. But definitely not much.

But Mr. Powell then appeals, claiming that because the trial court modified the sentence, it should have granted him a full resentencing -- one that included all of the many sentencing changes that have taken place in California since he was originally sentenced in 2008. The Attorney General disagrees, and says that the trial court didn't have jurisdiction to do anything at all.

The Court of Appeal disagrees with both sides, and holds that the trial court did have jurisdiction to correct the miscalculated pretrial custody credits, but that's it, and was not required to (and could not) engage in a full resentencing.

And then the Court of Appeal holds that, in fact, Mr. Powell was entitled to three, rather than two, additional days of custody credits. So amends his sentence accordingly.

That counts as a win, I guess?

People v. DePape (Cal. Ct. App. - June 30, 2026)

Did it really make sense for the San Francisco District Attorney's Office to bring this appeal?

It's a high-profile matter, and involves the conviction of David DePape for smashing the head of Paul Pelosi, the husband of Nancy Pelosi, during DePape's attempted kidnapping of Nancy. Shortly before DePape went on trial in state court, he was convicted in federal court for similar (federal) offenses, so he moved to dismiss some of the state court charges against him on statutory double jeopardy grounds. The trial court agreed, dismissing five of the eight counts against DePape. The SF District Attorney's Office then filed a writ and, ultimately, an appeal.

I get that the District Attorney was miffed. The double jeopardy issue is a tough one. Which is, in part, why there's a split opinion on appeal. There's an argument that the trial court got it wrong -- not a totally obvious one, but an argument nonetheless. Hence at least the facial need to file an appeal.

But can we step aside for a second to address the practical realities here?

DePape was already convicted in federal court and sentenced to 30 years in prison. He's 46 years old now. This is federal time, so even if we're only looking at the federal convictions, he's not getting out anytime soon (if ever).

But that's not all. Three of the eight state court charges against DePape went forward at trial. And at that trial, DePape was convicted of those charges -- none of which are at issue in today's appeal -- and received life without the possibility of parole as a result.

As a result, DePape is already in prison. Forever. Even in a Bizarro-World scenario in which President Trump grants a federal pardon because he too would like to have smashed Nancy Pelosi on the head with a hammer -- and I sincerely wish that ludicrous scenario was radically more absurd than it might actually be in the present political climate -- DePape would still remain in a California prison for the rest of his life regardless of the outcome of the present appeal.

Given that reality, does it really make sense to spend time and money prosecuting an appeal on a legal issue that's entirely specific to one guy and that practically matters not in the slightest?

(Especially when the SF DA's Office ultimately loses that appeal, thereby entrenching the trial court's otherwise nonprecedential opinion into a published Court of Appeal opinion?)

At some point, just take the W and go home.

Doe v. McGrath Kavinoky LLP (Cal. Ct. App. - June 29, 2026)

The practical import of today's opinion by the Court of Appeal is both important and easy to spell out:

Don't represent multiple plaintiffs against the same defendant on the same type of tort without disclosing the potential conflict of interest; otherwise, your engagement agreement, including its arbitration clause, might (as here) be held invalid.

Lesson learned.

In re I.H. (Cal. Ct. App. - June 25, 2026)

Police officers have a warrant to arrest a guy named Delgadillo. Based on something (unstated), they think he might be in a particular hotel room in Colton. After they set up on that hotel room, two people walk out of it. They think that one of the guys is Delgadillo, so they tackle him to the ground.

But it's not Delgadillo. It's someone else.

Turns out, though, that the guy they tackled -- a teenager -- had a gun in his waistband. So they charge him (in a wardship petition) with that.

The mistakenly-tackled guy (I.H.) moves to suppress, saying the police didn't have probable cause to tackle him, since he admittedly hadn't done anything wrong (or even suspicious). But the Court of Appeal disagrees, saying:

"The officers also reasonably mistook I.H. to be Delgadillo. The arrest warrant for Delgadillo described him as a Hispanic male in his late teens or early 20s, about six feet tall, with brown or black hair and brown eyes. I.H. largely matched that description: he was 17 at the time of his arrest, about six feet tall, and has black hair and brown eyes.

I might perhaps helpfully add, however, that this basic description lumps in a huge number of Hispanic male youth. They're all in their "late teens or early 20s," a large fraction of them are "about six feet tall (around a quarter of Hispanic males are between 5'9 and 6'3), and over 90% of them have "brown or black hair and brown eyes." So we're basically saying that "If two Hispanic males walk out of a hotel room, one of them is probably the guy we're looking for, so tackle the taller one." The description that the Court of Appeal highlights as a "reasonable mistake" is so general as to be almost useless, at least for that particular ethnic group.

I'll also mention that the Court of Appeal's statement in this regard doesn't reflect either (1) that the description of Delgadillo was that he was "wearing a black sweater, dark-color hat[,] and sunglasses," and there's no indication anywhere that I.H. had any of that, and (2) the description of Delgadillo also included that he had particular tattoos on his arm, whereas I.H. didn't have any arm tattoos at all.

So the description that of Delgadillo that might perhaps to some seem fairly specific, and to closely describe I.H. as well, is actually, I think, really just a description of a wide swath of Hispanic youth.

Something to think about.

In re J.L. (Cal. Ct. App. - June 24, 2026)

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 of the defendants paid for by the state. An initial appellate opinion produced by three state-paid appellate justices and their staff. Review by the (state-paid) California Supreme Court, resulting in a transfer for the Court of Appeal to reconsider its decision. More briefing filed by state-paid counsel for both sides. Resulting in another 20-plus page opinion by the Court of Appeal.

All over whether a particular restitution order should be reduced by the princely sum of $750 for one of the defendants and $205 for the other.

A $15,000+ restitution order imposed upon two minors that, in all likelihood, will never be paid anyway.

At least arguably not a perfect allocation of substantial social resources.

Pitt v. Shefler (Cal. Ct. App. - June 24, 2026)

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 the case involves his high-profile dispute with Angelina Jolie over the sale of their jointly-owned winery? I would be surprised if the answer was "No."

The Court of Appeal reverses the trial court's grant of the motion to quash, finding that personal jurisdiction in California exists. I'll leave everything else about the opinion to the higher-profile press articles that this particular dispute will undoubtedly receive.

Fazel v. Pete Fowler Const. Svcs (Cal. Ct. App. - June 23, 2026)

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 prior lawsuit, plaintiff Maryam Fazel sued her neighbor due to water intrusion emanating from her neighbor’s property. The neighbor retained Pete Fowler Construction Services (Fowler Construction or Fowler) as an expert. Fowler Construction prepared an expert report in which it recommended repairs that later formed the basis of a settlement of the lawsuit. After the repairs were implemented and the underlying suit settled, however, the water intrusion returned.

In the present lawsuit, Fazel sued Fowler Construction for negligence in the formulation of the repairs. The court entered judgment on the pleadings in favor of Fowler, ruling that Fowler’s recommendations were generated for an expert report in the course of litigation, and thus the absolute litigation privilege barred Fazel’s suit. We agree and affirm the judgment."

The remainder of Justice Sanchez's short-but-sweet opinion also smartly addresses the underlying details as well as the unsuccessful arguments to the contrary. Nicely done.

Cocom v. ABM Aviation, Inc. (9th Cir. - June 23, 2026)

Imagine that you're an attorney representing a corporation and defending a wage and hour class action in the Central District of California filed by one of your janitorial employees. In the district court, you moved to compel arbitration, but the judge held that the company's arbitration agreement was unconscionable.

You filed an appeal in the Ninth Circuit. I generated randomly generated the following panels, one of which is the panel in the actual case. All of the panels contain two active judges and one senior judge. You're hoping that the Ninth Circuit will reverse the district court and compel arbitration. Which of the following is your dream panel?

A.  Judges Murguia, Bumatay and Tashima.

B.  Judges Koh, VanDyke and Graber.

C.  Judges Desai, Sanchez and Sidney Thomas.

D.  Judges Tallman, VanDyke and Tung.

E.  Judges Mendoza, Forrest and McKeown.

The company here gets both its hoped-for panel as well as its hoped-for result.

People v. Sacco (Cal. Ct. App. - June 22, 2026)

After a relatively long period of inactivity, the California Court of Appeal gets back into the game today with several published opinions. Every one of them affirms the decision below.

This opinion struck me as interesting not because the Court of Appeal gets it wrong, but rather because the fact that it's somewhat close is fairly surprising. The defendant intercepted mail intended for a local post of the American Legion and cashed some checks that belonged to it. His scheme was fairly sophisticated; he had set up bank accounts in related names, had gotten replacement checks in his fake names sent to him by various entities who paid money to the Legion, and basically operated a neat little scam that netted him a healthy chunk of change.

When he got caught, he hired a psychologist who prepared a report that said that the defendant's mental health -- basically, stress -- was a significant factor in his crimes. On that basis, the defendant requested mental health diversion, which would basically amount to no criminal consequences for his fraud.

What surprised me what that the DA's office (1) didn't hire an expert to refute these claims, and (2) when time came to argue the motion orally, didn't offer any argument in response to the defense, and simply submitted on the papers.

Admittedly, that gambit worked, and the trial court denied diversion. I was nonetheless somewhat surprised at the laissez-faire attitude of the DA's office. I would have perhaps expected the expenditure of a little more effort, particularly given the nature of the crimes at issue.

People v. Brim (Cal. Ct. App. - June 17, 2026)

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. It's an extremely good one. Well written, well argued, and persuasive on the merits. Really well done.

My only marginal critique is that I felt as though the opinion could have given the deceased victim here a touch more respect. The victim -- Oliver Williams -- was stabbed to death by the defendant (Jermaine Brim) during a fight on a BART train that was instigated when the barefoot defendant attempted to get some shoes from someone sleeping on the train. Mr. Williams stepped in to confront Mr. Brin and ordered him to leave the train; Mr. Brin did so, but then returned, a scuffle ensued, and ultimately Mr. Brin stabbed Mr. Williams to death.

Maybe the case involved a second degree murder, or maybe it involved voluntary manslaughter. That is what the published opinion is all about, and rightfully so.

But I would have preferred that the opinion, at least once, describe the deceased victim, Mr. Williams, as a good Samaritan. Because that's surely what he was. For better or worse, he was trying to protect someone else on a BART train. He didn't have to do that. Many -- perhaps most -- other people in that situation would have simply turned away, or watched the events transpire helplessly.

Mr. Williams didn't do that. He tried to help. And he ultimately paid for that decision with his life.

That deserves, in my mind, at least a little respect. Were it me, I would have expressly given it.

Quinteros v. Harbor Dist. Co. (Cal. Ct. App. - June 11, 2026)

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 another $1,000 to the court.

But sometimes, you just have to let it be. Rather than appeal the thing and result in a published opinion like this one.

It's yet another opinion about AI-generated briefs. (Anyone starting to get the message on that?) This time from a firm that used a contract attorney and didn't check his work -- amongst other problems.

Not only does the law firm and its attorneys lose the appeal, but it results in an opinion that includes the following representative content:

"The [trial] court compared quotations from the opposition to existing legal authority and stated, LLG “repeatedly and seriously misrepresent[s] the holdings of these and other cases” and “blatant misrepresentations appear throughout the brief.” The court pointed out, “the brief contains no fewer than eight fabricated quotations that purportedly appear in cases cited by” LLG and stated, again in bold font, “Literally every other purported quotation from a case in the brief is similarly fictitious.” The court expounded: “If these fabricated quotations were created by the use of a generative artificial intelligence tool such as ChatGPT, they are even more insidious than quotations from ‘hallucinated’ cases because they are attributed, falsely, to actual reported (if miscited) cases, which renders them more difficult and burdensome to detect." . . .

At the July 11 hearing on the OSC, Schelly and Badawi appeared in person as the court had directed. The court began the hearing by explaining the reason for the OSC: “The brief contained inaccurate citations, misrepresentations of California law, and remarkably eight different purported quotations from cases that are as far as the court can determine, entirely fabricated, invented, they don’t exist. [¶] They don’t appear in any of the cited cases. They don’t appear in any reported California case authority.”

Speaking on LLG’s behalf, Schelly apologized to the court and stated, “we’re all absolutely embarrassed, dismayed, upset that something like this has occurred involving our firm.” The court responded, “unfortunately, Mr. Schelly, the damage is done, but in the sense that both the court and your opponent had been put [through] the burden of reading and responding to a brief that turned out to be dishonest and—literally, almost literally, at every page. [¶] This is the worst example of misconduct by a lawyer that I think I’ve ever seen since I’ve been on the bench.”"

Yeah. Might have wanted to just take your lumps and go home on that one.

People v. Russo (Cal. Ct. App. - June 12, 2026)

The Court of Appeal decided to publish this (originally unpublished) opinion, which means that the following opening paragraph now gets to live on in perpetuity:

"[I]n February 2024, defendant’s mother told defendant to leave her property. Defendant responded by punching his dog approximately 20 times, calling it racial slurs, and dragging it down the street."

Dude: Why take it out on the dog?! (Also: Calling your dog racial slurs? Really? Does that even make any sense?)

In re Marriage of Capos (Cal. Ct. App. - June 12, 2026)

The Court of Appeal amends its opinion, inter alia, to add the following footnote (emphasis in original):

"The trial court’s math appears to be wrong, and the total amount awarded ($768,748.65) does not match the total amount LaShelle requested ($768,478.65), but neither party mentions these discrepancies, so we do not either."

To be honest, I do that whole "switch the numbers" thing on occasion as well.

County of Del Norte v. Britt (Cal. Ct. App. - June 11, 2026)

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 gets ugly. The County then declares the house a nuisance, gets a receiver appointed, evicts the squatters, and hauls off fourteen tons of trash, junk and debris.

All this makes sense. Good government at work.

With the following caveat.

The dead guy has two sisters. They have zero interest in the house. They never opened up a probate estate and never sought to get any of their brother's assets. The County asks them if they care at all about what happens to the house. The sisters say "No." It was their brothers'. He's dead. Deal with it however you'd like. Burn it down, for all they care.

After evicting everyone and cleaning out the trash, the receiver then rehabilitates the house, finds a buyer, sells it, and uses the proceeds to off the mortgage as well as the costs incurred by the County. But those funds weren't sufficient to fully pay the receiver's own fees.

So the receiver then asks the court to make the sisters pay his fees.

The sisters hire a lawyer, who essentially says "Hey, we didn't do anything here. It's not our house, we never wanted it, we never filed anything, and we shouldn't have to pay fees for something of which we had utterly no part." The sisters are also miffed because the receiver could have gotten a super-priority lien to make sure the receiver's own fees got paid first, but inexplicably failed to do so.

The trial court agreed, and didn't hold the sisters responsible. But when the sisters then moved to recover their fees, the trial court refused, holding that they were not recoverable.

The Court of Appeal reverses, holding that they were.

There's no way anyone should have gone after the sisters in the first place. They weren't responsible. It wasn't their house, they didn't want it, and they shouldn't be liable for something just because they're the closest relatives to someone who dies intestate. Just like someone who dies with a credit card debt, that's exclusively the dead person's problem, not the relatives'. (At least if the relatives, as here, don't want any benefit from the estate.)

I'm happy the sisters got their fees. Both in the trial court and on appeal.

 

In re Tung Trust (Cal. Ct. App. - June 9, 2026)

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 little about this opinion ever since it came out the day before yesterday.

It's not that I disagree with either the result or the reasoning. It's actually an outstanding opinion by Justice Fueur, and I'm totally down with everything she says. Indeed, in my mind, the case is a great example why we have appeal as a matter of right. Because sometimes, a single judge gets it wrong, and it makes sense to have three smart judges take at least a quick look at the thing (and sometimes a deeper look) to correct any errors that might have transpired. Even if in the majority of cases, the result ends up getting affirmed.

Here, by contrast, there's a reversal. And rightly so.

To me, the ruling in the trial court is a great example of how, on occasion, judges get too bogged down in doctrine and purported efforts to confine themselves to contractual (or statutory) language and, in doing so, leave common sense behind.

The question here is how to distribute the assets of a revocable trust once the settlor dies. In 2011, an unmarried mother, Ya-Ching Tung, established a trust that designated as successor beneficiaries her three adult children. Typical. Moreover, the trust contained all the usual boilerplate paragraphs about additional property that might be added to the trust, the 30-day survivor provision, a no contest clause, etc.

In 2016, the oldest of the three children died, leaving behind his three kids. That son was supposed to get the majority of the property in the trust. In 2019, the settlor (the mother) died, and shortly thereafter, in 2020, one of the two daughters in the trust also died, without issue. That left alive only one of the three original children -- the one who was originally supposed to get a tiny fraction of what was in the trust (less than 1/6th) -- alongside the three grandkids, the children of the eldest son.

The surviving daughter then becomes the trustee of the trust, and petitions to have . . . get this . . . all of the trust property given to her, because she was the only direct child still alive. She admits that California law generally says (of course it does!) that surviving children generally stand in the shoes of their parents if the parents are beneficiaries and die. But the surviving daughter says that doesn't apply because the boilerplate 30-day survivor provision of the trust "demonstrates a contrary intent" and means that the three grandchildren are totally cut out, leaving the daughter as the sole beneficiary.

The trial court agrees with her. The Court of Appeal reverses.

As I said, I'm totally on board for Justice Feuer's reasoning and result. [My bad on the original spelling, though -- sorry about that!] Spot on right.

But I was also fundamentally displeased with how the trial court went about its task here. Yes, we're interpreting a written document -- a trust. Yes, we generally follow what it says, and look to what the terms mean. Yes, I understand why a judge might (wrongly) view the 30-day survivor provision as perhaps saying that if one of kids predeceases her, that kid is treated as dead. (Though, truthfully, that provision is really just intended to avoid the problem of figuring out "who died first" in a situation in which the settlor and one of the beneficiaries gets offed in the same incident.)

But here's the thing. There's zero reason to think that that's how the settlor ACTUALLY intended her trust to be distributed. There's ZERO reason why the grandmother would purportedly want the child who she gave the least amount under the trust (less than a sixth) to have the whole thing, while leaving her grandkids out in the cold merely because their mother had the misfortune of dying first. That's not how people actually act. I'm a thousand percent confident that was not, in fact, the settlor's intent. Yet that's what the trial court ended up deciding.

Common sense should matter. Actuating the intent of the written instrument should matter. That's got to play a role. Even if you think -- and especially if you think mistakenly -- that the words in the document technically or literally mean something else.

Text matters. So does intent.

And yeah, yeah, yeah, I know the whole parole evidence rule and the like. I understand that principle. Ditto for statutory interpretation, which follows the same general principle.

But written text is often more ambiguous than what we facially perceive it to be. Particularly when, as here, we've got a very reasonable, common sense interpretation of what that written text was intended to do.

Short version: Don't lose the forest for the trees. Don't forget what we're actually trying to do in cases like this one. Yes, we're reading text. But we're also very much trying to effectuate intent.

Don't leave common sense behind.