Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

Posts Tagged ‘California’

California Supreme Court: Ladies’ Nights are Lawyers’ Nights

Last week, the California Supreme Court handed down yet another victory for abusive “antidiscrimination” litigation, ruling in favor of a California attorney who makes a business out of suing legitimate businesses for violations of California’s absurdly broad Unruh antidiscrimination law. Marc Angelucci and three of his fellow travelers sued the Century Supper Club, a nightclub, for charging women less than men on several occasions in 2002; although two lower courts found reasons to rule against them, the California Supreme Court ruled that their claims had merit. (Court decision: PDF)

Unfortunately, as a matter of law the Court is right. The Unruh law is written ridiculously, and it has no exception for bogus plaintiffs. (What’s the big deal? Just this: Unruh provides for a minimum of $4,000 damages, plus attorney’s fees, for successful plaintiffs, thus providing an incentive for Angelucci to turn an anti-Ladies’ Night crusade into a career. Even the California court recognized that its interpretation of the law improperly rewarded “professional plaintiffs and bounty-hunting attorneys,” but it (correctly) held that rewriting laws is for the legislature, not the courts.

Oh, and one of the plaintiffs’ lawyers in this case? Our old friend, Morse Mehrban. (Most recently covered: Apr. 17, and see links therein.) Mehrban and Angelucci have teamed up on these cases many times before.

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California Good Samaritan out of luck

Alexandra Van Horn was a passenger in a car that ran into a light pole at 45 mph. Lisa Torti, a passenger in a car following behind, stopped at the crash scene and tried to render assistance by lifting Van Horn out of the car. Van Horn emerged from the accident a paraplegic, although court testimony differed on whether the accident itself or Torti’s attempt to pull her out of the vehicle was responsible for this. Now a California appeals court has ruled that the state’s Good Samaritan liability shield does not protect Ms. Torti from Ms. Van Horn’s negligence suit because it “only protects people from liability if they are administering emergency medical care. The perceived danger of remaining in the wrecked car was not ‘medical,’ the court ruled.” (“Court: Law may not protect Good Samaritan from suit”, AP/CourtTV, Mar. 23).

Update Dec. 19, 2008: Calif. high court rules for plaintiff.

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Protest a group home, get investigated for housing bias

They’re doing it again in California: “State and federal authorities have opened an investigation into a Norco housewife, alleging that her vitriolic protests against a high-risk group home in her neighborhood may constitute housing discrimination.” Federal officials asked state fair housing regulators to investigate Julie Waltz, 61, who had protested plans to open a group house next to her home for developmentally disabled residents; among those eligible to reside there under state law would be persons deemed not competent to stand trial on sex crime charges. In 2000, the Ninth Circuit ruled that three Berkeley, Calif. neighbors’ rights had been violated by an “extraordinarily intrusive and chilling” investigation of whether their protests had been contrary to housing discrimination law. In that episode, as in the latest one, housing advocates had set the investigation in motion by filing complaints against the neighbors.

A spokesman for the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development acknowledged that in order to recommend the inquiry, it had to push aside internal guidelines that prohibit such an investigation because it infringes on the 1st Amendment.

The rules require that complaints of housing discrimination be investigated only in cases in which the alleged victim’s safety has been threatened.

No such allegation has been made against Waltz, but HUD opened an investigation into her and state investigators ordered her to respond to the complaint in detail because a preliminary review showed that someone else in the neighborhood may have made a violent threat, said HUD spokesman Larry Bush.

(Garrett Therolf, “Protester of group home is targeted”, Los Angeles Times, Mar. 20).

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California wants to be your parent

If there’s a backlash underway against paternalism, you’d never know it from the crowded agenda of “nanny bills” under consideration in Sacramento, which include a ban on smoking in cars with kids present and proposed restrictions on keeping unspayed cats or dogs as pets. (Nancy Vogel, “Big mother is watching with new laws in mind”, Los Angeles Times, Mar. 8).

P.S. Regarding an Illinois version of the cigarettes-in-cars idea, Jacob Sullum has the good headline: “I Do Miss Mom, but At Least the Car is Smoke Free”.

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Calif. proposal to ban spanking, cont’d

Turns out there was a law professor behind the idea (Jan. 22):

As for what sparked [Assemblywoman Sally] Lieber’s decision to introduce a bill about spanking, it wasn’t a rash of emergency room visits from 3-year-olds with sore bottoms. The San Jose Mercury News, which first reported the no-spanking story, wrote that Lieber “conceived the idea while chatting with a family friend and legal expert in children’s issues worldwide.” That friend was University of San Francisco Law School professor Thomas Nazario, who fiercely opposes corporal punishment. “It was my idea and I was primarily responsible for coming up with the final draft,” he explains. (Which makes Lieber sound more like Nazario’s pawn than a legislative leader, but I digress.)

(Eilene Zimmerman, “Spanking mad”, Salon, Feb. 5). WryMouth (Jan. 29) has an account of Prof. Nazario’s appearance on the popular Los Angeles radio show “John & Ken” to discuss the idea. Orange County Register columnist Steven Greenhut writes: “I don’t advocate spanking as a rule, but it seems rather harsh to rip a child out of a happy home and put him in some nightmare foster-care scenario and put a parent in jail for doing something that has been widely practiced through the history of parenting.” (“Lawmaker deserves a spanking”, Jan. 28).

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Mother’s Day Stadium Promotion: What’s “Frivolous” About It?

Regarding Walter’s post below, I’d just like to point out that the judge probably had no choice in declining to dismiss the lawsuit. Indeed, the plaintiffs may very well win.

What is often overlooked (but not by Walter) is that California has a monstrous law called the “Unruh Act” that specifically authorizes such a cause of action for what most people consider harmless, de minimis gender-based discrimination.

I’ve heard that there are California law firms that specialize in Unruh claims. I can remember back in high school watching Judge Wapner of “The People’s Court” arbitrate an Unruh claim over a “Ladies’ Night” at a California bar — the male plaintiff won.

So, we are dealing here not with a frivolous lawsuit, but with a frivolous law. Passed by frivolous politicians.

To whom, for some reason, judges are supposed to show great deference. Go figure.

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Look for the union libel

“A jury ruled Friday that a labor union defamed Sutter Health with a mass mailing of postcards and awarded the Northern California health care organization almost $17.3 million in damages. The Placer County jury found that Unite Here, one of the nation’s largest unions that represents hotel, restaurant and laundry workers, defamed Sutter Health early last year by sending postcards to women of child-bearing age in Northern California claiming the organization’s hospitals used unclean linens. The union was in a labor dispute with the laundry service that cleaned the linens at the time.” (“Jury: Union defamed Sutter Health”, InsideBayArea.com (Hayward Daily Review), Jul. 23; Mehul Srivastava, “Jury award stings union”, Sacramento Bee, Jul. 22).

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Update: Calif. shakedowns

The New York Times “Small Business” section looks at how Garden Grove, Calif. liquor store owner Vinod Kapoor fought back when targeted by attorney Harpreet Brar, famed for his lawsuits demanding legal fees from small businesses over alleged regulatory infractions (see Aug. 20, 2002, Jul. 22, 2003, Nov. 1, 2004). Included are some updates:

In February, Judge Polos [Peter J. Polos of Orange County Superior Court] sent Mr. Brar to jail for two weeks for violating his order [not to name multiple businesses in one suit], calling him “an extortionist.”

Mr. Brar said his experience in jail was a “nightmare,” which he said included watching several inmates be beaten by guards. Mr. Brar said he planned to represent several of them.

On April 16, Mr. Brar was suspended from practicing law for 30 days and placed on probation for two years for filing a frivolous motion and appeal against the attorney general and for using the courts as a delaying tactic, according to Kristin Ritsema, one of several supervising trial counsels at the state bar.

“I think he is a huge threat to the public,” Ms. Ritsema said.

Another local liquor store owner, Herve Domange, who is from Paris, said: “You couldn’t do this in France. In France, these lawsuits would not be possible. But I don’t want to say too much. I’m afraid I might get sued.” (Regan Morris, “Picking the Wrong Mom and Pop to Sue”, New York Times, Jun. 1).

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Revealing someone’s criminal record = privacy invasion?

Eugene Volokh on the background of a case now pending in the Ninth Circuit:

Unfortunately, for several decades, California courts did indeed take the view that accurately discussing people’s crimes from a decade or more ago could lead to legal liability. Such speech, a discussion in a 1971 California Supreme Court said, serves no “public purpose” and is not “of legitimate public interest”; there is no “reason whatsoever” for it, when (in the court’s view) the plaintiff has been “rehabilitated” and has “paid his debt to society.”

In 2004, the state’s high court recognized that as regards the media and its reporting, this stance had become inconsistent with modern views of the First Amendment. Unfortunately, the court left open the possibility that non-media defendants might still face damage suits for privacy invasion over such disclosures, and exactly that possibility has now eventuated in a case by the name of Readylink Healthcare v. Lynch. (Mar. 15)

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