The California Blog of Appeal: Appellate Law

Home -> Law Blog Directory -> Appellate Law Blogs

OR PHONE (866) 635-1838 for Bankruptcy Help, (866) 635-6190 for Divorce,
(866) 635-2689 for Personal Injury or (866) 635-9402 for Criminal Defense

Find a Local Lawyer

Bankruptcy (866) 635-1838
Divorce (866) 635-6190
Personal Injury (866) 635-2689
Criminal Defense (866) 635-9402

Appellate Law

The California Blog of Appeal

Substantive legal developments in the California Courts of Appeal, California Supreme Court, and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals; Procedural law relating to the prosecution of appeals, writ petitions, and post-trial motions in state and federal courts in California; and practical skills essential to appellate practice.
By Greg May

Post Frequency: 1.4/day

Last Entry: February 11, 2020 at 16:16:49

OMG! Can you imagine writing an argument in the style of an email or a text?

Posted on September 16, 2015
If not, then why write emails and texts the way you do? In this article at The Federalist, staff writer Philip Wegmann takes millennials and curmudgeons alike to task for degrading the quality of written communications. The piece starts with this: On the floor of the Senate, surrounded by elected officials and important dignitaries, an eccentric inventor started texting...

You can?t change the rules on appeal just because you don?t like the outcome at trial: how judicial estoppel can foil your appeal

Posted on September 16, 2015
California trial courts classify civil cases as either “limited jurisdiction” or “unlimited jurisdiction,” depending on the amount in dispute. If the amount in dispute is $25,000 or less, the case is a limited jurisdiction case...

Jargon-filled, academic writing has no place in your briefing on appeal ? but does it have its place?

Posted on September 11, 2015
Maybe so, according to Professor Cass Sunstein of Harvard Law School, if this abstract for his article summarizes it accurately: Many people, including many lawyers and judges, disparage law reviews (and the books that sometimes result from them) on the ground that they often deal with abstruse topics, of little interest to the bar, and are sometimes full of jargon-filled, excessively academic, and sometimes impenetrable writing...

?Close? counts in horseshoes and hand grenades, but not when it comes to identifying ?new? evidence in a new trial motion

Posted on September 10, 2015
For purposes of a new trial motion, evidence is considered “newly discovered” if the party seeking the new trial “could not, with reasonable diligence, have discovered and produced [the evidence] at trial.” (Code Civ. proc., § 657, subd...

To access this complete feed in the blog feed reader login or register for free.

No appeal from order vacating partial arbitration award

Posted on September 09, 2015
One of the frustrations for parties forced to arbitrate their claims rather than pursue them in court is the unavailability of a direct route of appeal from the arbitration award. Generally, the only way to get out from under an adverse award is to petition the superior court to vacate the award (Code Civ...

Construction defect case demonstrates a ?two-fer? on grounds for obtaining review by petition for writ of mandamus

Posted on August 28, 2015
I frequently get calls from prospective clients who are “rarin’ to go” on a writ petition to challenge a trial court ruling that has them outraged but is not immediately appealable. That “rarin’ to go” attitude usually does not last beyond the point where I tell them that more than 90% of writ petitions are summarily dismissed without the petitioner ever being heard on the merits...

Sixth District Court of Appeal offers the legislature some advice on amending the anti-SLAPP statute

Posted on August 27, 2015
If you just lost your appeal, handled by attorneys at a high-powered law firm, with fees approaching ? oh, heck, who knows, but three lawyers billing at a “BigLaw” firm have to run up a pretty hefty bill on a case potentially worth billions of dollars ? you might not be happy with language in the introduction of the opinion characterizing your appeal as “utterly without merit” and noting that the court declined imposing sanctions only because the court did “not wish to further delay the long-overdue trial of the merits of [the] action...

Friday Appellate Humor

Posted on August 21, 2015
Here’s the graphic from a good New Yorker cartoon about appeals: To avoid exceeding fair use, I’ve left off the punchline. Here’s a clue: there’s only one judge on the bench, so you know this cartoon depicts the trial court instead of the appellate court...

Some technical help for e-filing in the Court of Appeal

Posted on August 20, 2015
This week, the Second District Court of Appeal published a terrific guide for creating electronic documents. (PDF link) The guide is broken down into a section on briefs and a section on appendices, and is meant as a technical guide, not a set of rules for filing...

The Court of Appeal Time Machine ? Interest Calculations on Modified Judgments

Posted on August 20, 2015
If you obtained a judgment against your former client for over $7.7 million, and had the court of appeal knock it down to around $1.7 million, and the trial court entered judgment in that reduced amount 14 months after the date of the original judgment, you would want interest to run on the judgment ? even from the reduced amount ? from the date of the original judgment, right? Of course you would...

The standard of review on appeal regarding enforceability of arbitration clauses

Posted on August 19, 2015
As I’ve mentioned before, the standard of review is not always clear. One sometimes has to “drill down” past the obvious, and the “abuse of discretion” standard is full of nuance. The parties’ briefs may even fight over which is the correct standard of review to apply, or the cases may be split on the issue...

Mandatory E-filing comes to the Third District Court of Appeal

Posted on August 12, 2015
Details here. The court has adopted a new Local Rule 5 covering e-filing procedures, which become effective September 14. It looks like documents need to be filed through the proprietary TrueFiling system. If you have an appeal pending in the third district now, make sure you register for the e-filing system promptly.

How hanging out with the wrong crowd might doom your appeal of your criminal conviction

Posted on August 12, 2015
Don’t be too alarmed at the title of this post. I’m not saying that the Court of Appeal will take the character of your known friends into account when deciding your appeal. I’m referring to convictions arising out allegations that members of a small group participated in a crime together...

Are records on appeal from the Los Angeles Superior Court about to get better?

Posted on August 11, 2015
The headline is not a dig at anyone at the Los Angeles Superior Court (LASC). It refers to the impact of the statewide court budget crunch, which led many courts to stop providing court reporters as a matter of course. Faced with having to engage court reporters on their own, some litigants were foregoing the expense, at risk of having records inadequate to prosecute their appeals...

SB 470 codifies Reid v. Google, Inc., provides that objections to summary judgment evidence are preserved for appeal

Posted on August 11, 2015
On Monday, according to this article at The Recorder, Governor Brown signed SB 470, amending Code of Civil Procedure section 437c, which governs procedure for motions for summary judgment and summary adjudication. For appellate practitioners, the significance of the bill lies in its codification of Reid v...

Changes to the blog

Posted on August 10, 2015
Regular readers will note a different look to the blog, which I implemented over the weekend. I actually liked the old look better, but my WordPress upgrade “broke” the Headway theme I used to create it. So, I’ve used a stock WordPress theme, which I was able to customize only in color and font choice...

Apparently, the law library of the future is going to be one big Kindle

Posted on August 07, 2015
The Journal of the Legal Writing Institute has just published a short essay by Professor Ronald E. Wheeler of Suffolk University Law School, titled “Is This the Law Library or an Episode of the Jetsons?” The big takeaway: the library is going to resemble a super-advanced Kindle and its patrons will look like they are parts of the Borg Collective: It will include technologies that we know about and technologies that are beyond our imaginations...

Is your notice of appeal likely to generate settlement leverage?

Posted on August 04, 2015
Every so often, I get a prospective appellant who is convinced that filing his notice of appeal will intimidate his adversary, prompting him to “come to the table” to hammer out a deal. Good luck with that. It’s not that cases cannot settle on appeal...

California Supreme Court invites your comment on proposed changes to publication rules involving cases accepted for review

Posted on July 30, 2015
I expect that in this age of electronic research, most lawyers have experienced the frustration of finding the “perfect” case, only to learn it is unpublished and therefore could not be cited as precedent. (See rule 8.1115(a), Cal. Rules of Court...

Don?t treat one superior court judge as the reviewing court for another

Posted on July 28, 2015
Writs and appeals are sometimes not the only routes (or even the preferred routes) to relief from an adverse order or judgment. Motions for reconsideration, post-trial motions for new trial or to vacate the judgment, and motions to set aside a judgment all have the possibility of getting you a “reversal” of sorts without ever leaving the superior court...

The appellate angle in Marriage of Davis

Posted on July 23, 2015
Family law attorneys are buzzing this week about Monday’s unanimous Supreme Court decision in Marriage of Davis, case no. S215050 (July 20, 2015). The Metropolitan News-Enterprise summed up the holding this way: “A married person cannot be considered separated, and thus permitted to keep his or her earnings as separate property, while continuing to live with his or her spouse[...

Congrats and thank you to the new TEN Networks Blog (and welcome, TEN members!)

Posted on July 21, 2015
The TEN Networks, Inc. launched its blog last week, and the editors graciously designated The California Blog of Appeal as one of its Member Blogs of the Month, along with with Elderupdates.com, the blog of Encino elder law attorney Brian Shepphard. The TEN Networks is the umbrella organization for two business networking groups: The Esquire Network, a fantastic attorney group with a unique meeting structure, of which I am an enthusiastic member; and The Executive Network, which is open to other professionals...

Federal Judge: Appellate Judges Know Nothing About Tech

Posted on July 21, 2015
Those words after the colon come straight from the headline at Bloomberg News, where you can treat yourself to a 40-minute interview with federal district judge Shira A. Scheindlin of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, conducted at the 2015 Big Law Business Summit...

Shameless request for nominations

Posted on July 17, 2015
Expert witness service The Expert Institute is taking nominations for entries in its 2015 Best Legal Blog Contest. Do I need to say anything more? OK, here comes the shameless part. Whether you are a years-long fanatical subscriber to this blog whose first action every morning upon waking is to grab your iPhone off your nightstand and check your RSS reader to see if there are any updates to this blog, or someone who just came across this blog yesterday, give some thought to nominating this blog...

Overcoming the abuse of discretion standard on appeal of an attorney fee award: what did the trial court actually do?

Posted on July 16, 2015
Respondents use the “abuse of discretion” standard for all it’s worth when defending against appeals, and they should. Often, it’s one heck of a shield. But there are limits to relying on this standard of review, and the Court of Appeal will reverse in appropriate circumstances...

The deadline for filing the memorandum and affidavits in support of a motion for new trial is not jurisdictional

Posted on July 10, 2015
Some parties try to make jurisdictional issues out of non-jurisdictional ones. You can hardly blame them, given the fatal nature of jurisdictional defects. One recent attempt ? but ultimately an unsuccessful one ? was in Kabran v. Sharp Memorial Hospital (2015) 236 Cal...

Egregious attorney misconduct at trial leads to reversal on appeal

Posted on July 09, 2015
When I was a young lawyer, a mentor told me to practice as if the rules will always be strictly enforced against me and my client, yet never enforced against the other side. I always took that as a bit of rhetorical flourish meant to emphasize careful compliance with the rules and to be ready for anything from the other side, but my mentor’s admonition appears to have been manifest in the trial leading up to Martinez v...

Don?t give up when your motion to dismiss an appeal is summarily denied

Posted on July 02, 2015
The term “summary denial” sounds pretty bad when you are the party seeking relief. It has an air of finality. Sheesh, not even a hearing on the merits! But a summary denial is not final in every context. This was recently pointed out in Ellis v...

How the nature of your appellate challenge can affect whether your appeal is dismissed for failure to obey trial court orders

Posted on June 30, 2015
The disentitlement doctrine allows a court of appeal to dismiss an appeal as a sanction for the appellant’s refusal to comply with trial court orders that remain in force while the appeal is pending. The lesson to be learned from today’s decision in Ironridge Global IV, Ltd...

No judicial notice for a law of physics, but for a different reason than you might expect

Posted on June 24, 2015
I had to take the “high track” physics courses as part of my electrical engineering major curriculum at Canoe U. In fact, I liked my physics classes more than my engineering classes, and regret to this day I did not major in physics. So the discussion in Bermudez v...

Previous | Next

Related Law Bulletins

California's Proposed Student Civil Rights Act Gives Broad Definition to "Religion"
On Tuesday, the California Senate Judiciary Committee approved by ...

The Justice Mills Lawyerâ€™s Relief Act of 2007 or Multiple Avenues of Appeal of a Comprehensive Permit Still Available.
Topics: Administrative Appeal; Zoning Appeal; Mootness; Housing Ap...

California mother held in custody breach case
I am posting this to draw attention to what should be simply routi...

California Governor Schwarzenegger Vetoes Gay Marriage Bill
Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed a gay marriage bill Friday, ...

Northern California Farmers Worry Fruit Will Rot On Trees
Yet another story about the plight of fruit and vegetable farmers ...