California Appellate Tracker

The federal Nutrition Education Act pre-empts Proposition 65’s requirement of a label on cereal warning of naturally occurring acrylamide in cooked whole grains. Read More

Bid-rigging at foreclosure sales is an antitrust violation. Read More

Merchants are not required to design their parking lots in such a way that disabled patrons may access their stores without traveling behind parked cars. Read More

A job applicant who would not have been hired even if inaccuracies in his credit report were corrected lacked Article III standing to bring a claim against the employer for failure to give him pre-adverse action notice as required by the Fair Credit Reporting Act. Read More

The trial court did not err in excluding a non-retained expert’s opinion on causation as it duplicated a retained expert’s more soundly based opinion. Read More

Under Civil Code 47(b)’s divorce exception, ex-wife’s allegedly defamatory statements about a nanny in a declaration filed in her marital dissolution proceeding are not protected by the litigation privilege. Read More

A citizen is allowed to intervene as of right in the government’s Clean Air Act suit only when that suit would bar the citizen from filing a private action. Read More

A botched Spanish translation felled an employer’s arbitration clause, creating a fatal ambiguity as to the severability of an impermissible waiver of the right to bring a Private Attorney General Act claim. Read More

PG&E was entitled to summary judgment on claim for punitive damages filed by victims of the 2015 Butte Fire since there was no evidence of malice. Read More

The federal Communications Decency Act barred the trial court from directing Yelp! to remove libelous content from a review posted by a third party. Read More

At trial, the court must give a party it has granted in forma pauperis status a free court reporter or other means of obtaining a verbatim transcript. Read More

Claims for prenatal injuries to a baby caused by the mother’s exposure to toxic chemicals are governed by the two-year statute of limitations for personal injuries from exposure to toxic chemicals, which includes tolling provisions for minors and for delayed discovery. Read More

A statute cannot be proactively invalidated on the ground that compliance with it is impossible, although noncompliance can be excused on impossibility grounds. Read More

The creditor of a father could not sue son to collect supposedly fraudulent transfer of money in the form of tuition payments that father made to cover son’s university education. Read More

The integration clause in a residential care facility’s contract did not supersede an arbitration agreement that the resident later signed; on remand, the trial court must consider plaintiffs’ other defenses to arbitration. Read More

A state law requiring public employees who are non-union members to pay agency fees to the union that is the certified bargaining agent for employees in their work unit violates the First Amendment by compelling the employees to fund speech with which they may not agree. Read More

American Express’s anti-steering policy, which forbids merchants from suggesting to customers, at the point of sale, that they use a non-Amex credit card that charges lower merchant fees, does not violate the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. Read More

A collection attorney engages in debt collection for purposes of the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act when he pursues judicial foreclosure because that proceeding allows for the collection of a deficiency judgment—unlike a nonjudicial foreclosure, the sole goal of which is to retake property given as security. Read More

Securitized mortgages that Freddie Mac or Fannie Mae held in trust for investors are considered the property of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, so HOAs cannot obtain a super-priority lien for unpaid dues that will take precedence over the mortgage loan. Read More

Attorney fees in Americans with Disabilities Act litigation are to be calculated using the lodestar method. Read More