Today's opinion is the latest installment of the controversy about changing the name of the "Hastings College of Law" to the "College of Law, San Francisco" on the grounds that S.C. Hastings -- the person who paid for and founded the law school -- did some really, really bad things. I have a decent amount of familiarity with the quality of the briefs generally submitted by the competing law firms that represent the parties in this appeal. Defendants (the law school) are represented by Gibson Dunn. Plaintiffs (the people who want the old name) are represented by the Harmeet Dhillon Law Group. O ..read more

I had some definite questions about the original opinion. Today, Justice Wiley's (extensive) edits answer a lot of them. It sounds like the defendant could have done a much better effort in the trial court to establish what appears to be, in fact, true ..read more

You'd think that it was a perfect life for California attorney Steven Slavitt. Graduated from Berkeley Law. Lives in Hawaii. Has a case in lovely Santa Barbara. Things are great, right? Until he gets sanctioned today for filing a frivolous appeal.  In a published opinion, no less ..read more

Justice Streeter begins today's opinion by relating a long-ago Court of Appeal decision to the Kennedy assassination: "Before daily life in this country froze on November 22, 1963 at 1:38 p.m. Central Time when the tragic news from Dallas came across the airwaves—or perhaps later that day, which would confirm that our courts always remain open, even in times of crisis—a minor event of little note occurred here in California: A First District Court of Appeal, Division One panel filed its opinion in Oliver v. Swiss Club Tell (1963) 222 Cal.App.2d 528(Oliver). Nearly 60 years later, the events in ..read more

You could definitely begin today's Ninth Circuit opinion the way Judge Bumatay does: "When someone points a gun at a law enforcement officer, the Constitution “undoubtedly entitles the officer to respond with deadly force.” George v. Morris, 736 F.3d 829, 838 (9th Cir. 2013). But what if the person points a replica gun that the officer believes is real? In this case, we must examine whether it was objectively reasonable for officers to believe a black toy airsoft rifle pointed in their direction presented an immediate threat justifying the use of deadly force. Based on the facts here, we say y ..read more

Today's state habeas opinion is 58 pages long. That's fairly lengthy. But you'd probably expect as much when the Court of Appeal (over a dissent) is releasing on parole a member of the Manson family, Leslie Van Houten. You probably want to write a fairly detailed opinion in that one, no? If only because (1) lots of people are going to read it (or at least hear about it), and (2) people are definitely going to mention the thing to you during the occasional cocktail parties and the like. I won't recount the details of the various Manson murders, of which you're probably at least already dimly ..read more

A default judgment gets entered against a defendant, and since it's a default judgment, no one showed up to represent the defendant. The trial court entered the default, but trimmed the recovery somewhat based on its view of what the statute required. The plaintiff then appealed. Again, since it's a default, no one showed up to represent the defendant on appeal. The Court of Appeal, partially reversed, based upon its interpretation of the relevant statute. The California Supreme Court then granted review. Now, in that tribunal, we're not willing to simply let one side argue the case without so ..read more

Jaguars -- the animal, not the vehicle -- used to be in the United States, but we killed them all. There are still 600 or so jaguars in the Santa Rita mountains of Northwest Mexico, and sometimes, they roam into the United States. They're definitely there; someone shot and killed one there in 1965, and we've taken pictures of others there as recently as 2012 and 2013. (There have been other confirmed photographs of jaguars in the United States more recently that aren't mentioned in the opinion, but whatever.) That said, it's pretty much demonstrably true that jaguars don't currently live and b ..read more

Usually, when you want to log and burn thousands of acres of forest, you've got to do an environmental analysis under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) to make sure that you're not, you know, killing species and stuff like that. The United States Forest Service granted a timber permit for doing just that way up in the Idaho panhandle -- that strip of land way up north near Canada. But the Forest Service said that it didn't need to comply with NEPA because there's an exception in the statute for forest fire prevention efforts -- allegedly like this one -- that are set in a "wildlife ..read more