California Appellate Tracker

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

An SEC enforcement action brought in federal court seeking civil penalties, disgorgement, and an injunction is subject to 28 USC 2642's five-year limitations period for suits on a statutory penalty.  Read More

A party that seeks to intervene in a pending action as of right under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 24(a)(2) must meet Article III standing requirements if it wishes to pursue relief that is different from or in addition to the relief requested by the plaintiff, such as, here, a money judgment in favor of the intervenor against the defendant.  Read More

To establish taxpayer standing under California Code of Civil Procedure 526a, a plaintiff need not allege he paid real property taxes, payment or liability to pay any tax assessed by the defendant government entity suffices.  Read More

Only the prosecutor, not any third party, owes a criminal defendant a duty to disclose material exculpatory evidence, and even the prosecutor need not disclose such evidence if it is developed by a third party not acting under the prosecutor’s control.  Read More