California Appellate Tracker

An employee may sue his employer's outside counsel for conspiring with Immigration & Customs Enforcement to have him deported as an unregistered alien in retaliation for his having filed suit against the employer alleging a violation of the Fair Labor Standards Act.  Read More

A California Vehicle code section requiring police to impound a car for 30 days when it is driven by an unlicensed driver is an unconstitutional seizure violating the Fourth Amendment since there is no justification for retaining the car after a licensed owner claims it.  Read More

Defendant movie studio’s Anti-SLAPP motion was properly denied as plaintiff’s implied-in-fact contract claim was based on the unprotected act of not paying him for his story idea, not on the protected act of producing the film based on his idea.  Read More

California cannot exercise personal jurisdiction over non-residents’ claims against a foreign corporation merely because the corporation engaged in the same conduct in California as to resident plaintiffs.  Read More

Senior citizen who held controlling interest in corporate borrower could not state elder abuse claim against lender that foreclosed on borrower; the senior citizen suffered only derivative harm; any damage claim belonged solely to the corporate borrower.  Read More

The federal Age Discrimination in Employment Act applies to all state and local government agencies without regard to the number of workers they employ, though it applies to private employers only if they have 20 or more workers.  Read More

Summary judgment for insurer on bad faith claim is reversed due to a triable issue as to whether insurer’s dispute about the claim amount was genuine since the insurer had not updated its medical expert’s opinion based on new evidence of the extent of the insured’s injuries.  Read More

State statute violated the First Amendment by forbidding registered sex offenders from accessing websites if the site allows minors to be members, because the prohibition was not sufficiently narrowly tailored to the state’s interest in protecting minors.  Read More

The prohibition on trademarking offensive or disparaging marks—here, an Asian dance rock band called “The Slants”—violated the First Amendment, since the prohibition serves no substantial governmental interest and is not narrowly drawn.  Read More

A borrower lacks standing to challenge foreclosure based on late assignment of the loan to a securitized trust as breach of the trust agreement renders the assignment voidable, not void, the borrower is not a third party beneficiary of that agreement, and the defects do not harm the borrower who would be foreclosed anyway.  Read More

Post-1972 public use of non-coastal land for any purpose cannot ripen into a prescriptive easement or implied dedication of the property.  Read More

An order denying a motion to vacate judgment is a separately appealable order, even if the issues raised on appeal overlap issues that the appellant could have or did raise on an appeal from the underlying judgment.  Read More

CCP 580d does not bar a creditor from suing a borrower to collect on a note secured by a junior lien that was extinguished by a non-judicial foreclosure of a senior lien, even if the creditor also held the senior lien on which it non-judicially foreclosed.  Read More

An entity that collects debts that it has purchased for its own account is not a “debt collector” for FDCPA purposes, since it is collecting on the debts for itself and not for another.  Read More

11 USC 727(e) sets a one-year-from-discharge time limit on a bankruptcy trustee’s request to revoke the discharge based on debtor’s fraud,  but since it is a statute of limitations, the debtor waives its protection if he fails to plead that defense in his answer.  Read More

A Court of Appeals lacks jurisdiction to entertain an appeal from a district court order denying class certification or striking class allegations after the named plaintiff has voluntarily dismissed his individual claims.  Read More

Committing a senile elderly person to a residential care facility is a "health care" decision, so only a person holding a health care power of attorney may make that decision for the elder; as a result, a facility’s arbitration agreement signed by an agent with only a regular power of attorney was not binding.  Read More

An order denying a motion to dismiss an antitrust action based on state action immunity is not immediately appealable under the collateral order doctrine.  Read More

An elderly couple stated an elder abuse claim against an insurance agency that schemed to gut their whole life insurance policies and replace them with a less desirable policy, all for the purpose of earning a larger commission.  Read More

Defendant hospital was entitled to summary judgment after plaintiff’s expert declaration stated only that husband "could have survived" had defendant treated him in accord with the standard of care—but stopped short of saying that survival was more likely than not but for the hospital’s acts, which is the standard for showing causation in a medical malpractice wrongful death action.   Read More