Standing

CCP 902 allows an appeal only by a party "aggrieved" by the appealed order or judgment.  Here, the watermaster appointed by the court to administer its judgment allocating water rights among claimants to the same river was not aggrieved and therefore lacked standing to appeal from a trial court order which interpreted the 60-year-old judgment allocating water rights among the… Read More

Plaintiff was the executrix as well as a beneficiary of her parents' estate. She claimed that a relative and co-beneficiary conspired with two other defendants to fraudulently induce her, as executrix, to take a large loan at usurious rates secured by the parents' house, the estate's principal asset, after which the co-beneficiary misappropriated most of the loan funds.  This decision… Read More

Oakland lacked standing to bring a price-fixing antitrust claim against Oakland Raiders and other NFL teams arising out of the Raiders' move to Las Vegas.  A finding of antitrust standing requires a balancing of the nature of the plaintiff’s alleged injury, the directness of the injury, the speculative measure of the harm, the risk of duplicative recovery, and the complexity… Read More

This decision dismisses as moot a suit that a taxpayer brought seeking to enjoin a program for granting emergency aid to undocumented aliens in California during the COVID pandemic.  The program proceeded while the case was pending.  All the program's money was spent.  There is no way to get the money back and no realistic threat that the program will… Read More

To have standing to move to disqualify another party's attorney, the movant must generally be a present or former client of the challenged attorney, or at least a person who shared confidential information with that attorney in the course of a confidential or fiduciary relationship.  Otherwise, the movant is generally not affected by any breach of the attorney's duties of… Read More

In a direct listing, the issuing company files a registration statement with the SEC which then allows it to sell its registered shares directly to the public and allows its existing shareholders to do so as well.  Since direct listing does not involve bank financing of the issuance, there is no "lock up" period during which unregistered shares cannot be… Read More

A director of a nonprofit public benefit corporation who brings an action on behalf of that corporation loses standing to pursue its claims if the director is not reelected to the office of director at any point during the litigation.  Here, plaintiff was not re-elected, lost standing, and his suit was properly dismissed. Read More

Following Kim v. Reins Internat. California, Inc. (2020) 9 Cal.5th 73, this decision holds that the plaintiff in this case had standing to pursue a PAGA suit against her employer because she alleged she had been a victim of one of the alleged violations of the Labor Code by her employer.  She did not lose her standing to sue under… Read More

Distinguishing In re Pecan Groves of America (9th Cir. 1991) 951 F.2d 242, this decision holds that a creditor with a security interest in the debtor's real property has standing to quiet title to the property based on the fact that the homeowners association foreclosed on the property while the automatic stay was in effect on the debtor's bankruptcy.  Under… Read More

Each class member must establish Article III standing in order to recover relief in a case in federal court.  Here, TransUnion included incorrect OFAC terrorist information in its credit files on 8,000 class members but issued credit reports to third parties with the incorrect OFAC information only as to 1,600 of the class members.  This decision holds that only the… Read More

A shareholder in a California-based corporation has Article III standing to sue the California Secretary of State to seek to enjoin SB 826 (2018) which enacted Corp. Code  301.3, 2115.5, requiring covered corporations to have at least one female director by 2019 and up to three female directors by 2021.  Even though the statute is directed against corporations, not their… Read More

Two individuals and a number of states lack standing to challenge the minimum essential coverage provision of Obamacare because Congress eliminated the penalty for non-compliance with the statutory requirement of minimum coverage.  As there was no longer any governmental compulsion to obtain the coverage, the individual plaintiffs could not show that their supposed injury from having paid for coverage was… Read More

Under CCP 526a, as amended in 2018, to have standing to bring a taxpayer suit, the plaintiff must show that it or one of its members (a) resided within the jurisdiction of the governmental entity at suit and (b) within a year before the challenged governmental action paid a tax that funds that entity which is a property tax, an… Read More

For an association to have standing to sue for its members, it must show that (a) its members would otherwise have standing to sue in their own right; (b) the interests it seeks to protect are germane to the organization's purpose; and (c) neither the claim asserted nor the relief requested requires the participation of individual members in the lawsuit. … Read More

Over a vigorous dissent, the majority holds that the adult daughter of the insureds under this homeowner's insurance policy does not have standing to sue the insurer for bad faith in regard to coverage for damage to the daughter's personal property that was damaged while in the insured premises.  Only the parents were named insureds under the policy, which expressly… Read More

To establish organizational standing, the plaintiff associations  needed to show that the challenged conduct frustrated their organizational missions and that they diverted resources to combat that conduct.  Diversion of resources happens when the plaintiffs alter their resource allocation to combat the challenged practices, but not when they go about their business as usual.  Here, the evidence on defendant's Rule 12(b)(1)… Read More

A request for nominal damages satisfies the redressability element of standing where a plaintiff’s claim is based on a completed violation of a legal right.  For the purpose of Article III standing, nominal damages provide the necessary redress for a past, completed violation of a legal right. Read More

Judgment for defendant is reversed.  Plaintiff alleged that defendant sold plaintiff his membership interest in the LLC, which held a business tax registration certificate for selling marijuana in L.A., but after doing so secretly converted the LLC into a corporation of which he was the sole owner.  The individual plaintiff had standing to sue for loss of her membership interest… Read More

A defendant is not aggrieved by, and so has no standing to appeal from, an order exonerating a co-defendant from liability to the plaintiff, even if the would-be appellant has a claim for contribution or indemnity against the exonerated defendant.  So, in this case, one contractor at the work site where plaintiff was injured had no standing to appeal from… Read More

Whitaker adequately alleged standing to bring a claim under the Americans with Disabilities Act by alleging that the counters in Tesla's showrooms were inaccessible to him (as a wheelchair-bound person) and deterred him from returning to Tesla's showrooms.  However, Whitaker's complaint was properly dismissed for failure to meet Iqbal/Twombly pleading standards as it mostly repeated the statutory elements of an… Read More