The Appellate Strategist : Appellate Lawyers & Attorneys for Updates on Trial Consultations, Amicus Briefs & Punitive Damage Awards

The California Supreme Court has declared that “labels matter,” and that under California’s Unfair Competition Law, a consumer’s subjective sense of feeling duped translates to a cognizable economic injury.

The Court’s majority opinion in Kwikset Corporation v. Superior Court (.pdf), issued today, January 27th, held that plaintiffs “who can truthfully allege they were deceived by a product’s label into spending money to purchase the product, and would not have purchased it otherwise, have ‘lost money or property,’” and therefore have standing to sue under California’s Unfair Competition Law and False Advertising Law.  The Court reversed a decision of the Fourth District Court of Appeal, and potentially opened the door to class action litigation brought by plaintiffs who have experienced no dissatisfaction with the actual function or performance of a manufacturer’s product. 

The plaintiffs brought a class action lawsuit alleging that they purchased locksets manufactured by Kwikset in reliance upon representations that the locks were “Made in U.S.A.” or similarly designated.  The locks contained components made in Taiwan or involved latch sub-assembly performed in Mexico.  The plaintiffs alleged violations of California’s Unfair Competition Law (Cal. Bus. & Prof. Code § 17200) for unlawful, unfair, and fraudulent business practices.  Their complaint further alleged violation of California’s False Advertising Law (Cal. Bus. & Prof. Code § 17500.)

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Before profiling potential candidates to replace Justice Moreno on the California Supreme Court, we first provide a brief profile of the remaining court – not including Justice Moreno, whose announced retirement has initiated this discussion. When choosing a new member for the high court, there is often a discussion about what is “missing” from the court; in order to better address that issue, it can be helpful to look at its existing composition.

The remaining six members of the California Supreme Court represent a total of 134 years of judicial experience, although only two of them, Chief Justice Cantil-Sakauye and Justice Corrigan, had extensive experience on the bench before joining the high court, each with about twenty years of prior experience. In comparison, Justice Chin had previously served as a judge for eight years, while the others had previously served for about three years each. There may be other types of judicial experience, however, in that Justice Werdegar was a senior staff attorney with both the California Court of Appeal and the California Supreme Court, while Justice Baxter assisted in the appointment of more than 700 judges while serving in the Deukmejian administration. However, regardless of their varied judicial experiences, each of the current justices had previously sat on a Court of Appeal before being nominated to the Supreme Court.

The average tenure of the remaining Supreme Court justices is about 13 years, ranging from 22 years for Justice Kennard to about one month for Chief Justice Cantil-Sakauye. A majority of the justices have been on the Supreme Court for at least 15 years. While the existing justices had widely varying experiences before taking the bench, all of them were government prosecutors earlier in their careers, most as deputy district attorneys (Justice Werdegar worked in the U.S. Dept. of Justice, Justice Kennard in the L.A. Attorney General’s office). All of the justices are long time California residents, with four of them native born and two others moving here in the early 1960’s. The average age of the remaining justices is about 65, with the youngest being Chief Justice Cantil-Sakauye at 51 years old.

All of the justices were nominated to the Supreme Court by Republican governors, two each by Deukmejian, Wilson and Schwarzenegger. As such, the new justice, like Justice Moreno, will be the only member of the Court nominated by a Democratic governor. Of the remaining six justices, four are women, meaning the court will have a female majority regardless of who Governor Brown nominates. Along ethnic lines, the court has three Asian-Americans and three justices of European descent. The current lack of either a Latino or an African-American has been raised by commentators in predicting the next nominee.

In future posts, we will profile candidates being considered to replace Justice Moreno on the California Supreme Court. 

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In Cassel v. Superior Court (Wasserman Comden Casselman & Pearson), the California Supreme Court evaluated the mediation confidentiality created by Evidence Code, § 1119, which prevents the admission of “evidence of anything said,” or any “writing” which was prepared “for the purpose of, in the course of, or pursuant to, a mediation. . . .”, subject only to certain statutory exceptions. Upholding an earlier Court of Appeal decision, Wimsatt, but reversing here, the Court found that the express statutory language applied to protect discussions between counsel and client made during and immediately preceding the mediation in the underlying action, even in a subsequent legal malpractice action in which counsel’s conduct at the mediation was a basis for the malpractice claim. As a result, the court found that counsel defending itself against a legal malpractice action was entitled to exclude evidence of such communications with its own former client, now the legal malpractice plaintiff. While expressing no opinion on the merits of this statutory scheme, the Court noted that the Legislature was free to reconsider it. Justice Chin concurred, “reluctantly,” noting this was “a high price to pay for confidentiality in the mediation process,” and suggesting statutory amendments which could avoid this result while preserving mediation confidentiality. For more history regarding Cassel, see the ADR update page.

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After serving the California courts for twenty-four years, Associate Justice Carlos R. Moreno has announced his retirement from the court.  In a recent interview, Justice Moreno said that recent changes, including the retirement of Chief Justice Ronald George and the election of Governor Jerry Brown, had prodded him to explore other possibilities.  His retirement creates an early opportunity for newly sworn Governor Brown to establish a tone for his administration. In future posts, we will provide profiles for candidates being considered to fill this unexpected vacancy. But first, we note the distinguished judicial career of Justice Moreno.

Justice Moreno is native to Los Angeles, where he continued to live after his appointment to the Supreme Court by commuting to San Francisco.  After receiving a B.A. in political science from Yale University (1970) and a 1975 J.D. from Stanford Law School, Carlos Moreno served in the Los Angeles City Attorney's Office, prosecuting criminal and civil consumer protection cases. In 1979, he joined a private firm, representing clients in general commercial litigation. During this time he was also president of the Mexican American Bar Association.

Moreno has enjoyed judicial nominations from both parties. Governor George Deukmejian appointed Justice Moreno to the Municipal Court, Compton Judicial District, in 1986, where Moreno handled general criminal matters and supervised the court’s civil department. In October 1993, Governor Pete Wilson elevated Justice Moreno to the Los Angeles County Superior Court, where he presided over felony trials in downtown Los Angeles. In 1997, Moreno received the Criminal Justice Superior Court Judge of the Year Award from the Los Angeles County Bar Association. President Bill Clinton nominated Justice Moreno to the federal bench, and he was unanimously confirmed to the United States District Court for the Central District of California by the United States Senate in February 1998.

After his nomination by Governor Gray Davis, Justice Moreno was sworn in as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of California on October 18, 2001. Moreno was given the Roger J. Traynor Appellate Justice of the Year Award from the Consumer Attorneys Association of Los Angeles in 2003. At present, Justice Moreno is the only Democrat on the Supreme Court, and the only Latino.  Describing himself as a “moderate-to-liberal centrist,” Moreno initially sided with conservative members of the court as often as its more liberal members. As the court reportedly became more conservative over the years Moreno wrote an increasing number of solo dissents, the most prominent of which was his dissent from the Court’s decision upholding Proposition 8, in which the Court reinstated the ban on same-sex marriage.  Justice Moreno was prominently mentioned as a potential nominee by President Obama for the United States Supreme Court both in 2009 and in 2010.  During that debate, Appellate Strategist profiled Justice Moreno here.

Join us below the jump for a sampling of Justice Moreno’s most important opinions.

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The CA Supreme Court has scheduled three civil cases for hearing on February 8, 2011. These cases address issues of duty & causation, the statute of limitations for multiple distinct injuries and the final judgment rule.

• Pooshs v. Philip Morris USA, Inc., et al., S172023, results from a request for guidance from the Ninth Circuit regarding the application of the statute of limitations on multiple distinct personal injuries allegedly arising from smoking tobacco; specifically - does the earliest injury trigger the statute for all claims, including those based on a later injury? For more details regarding Pooshs, see the Civil Procedure/Evidence/Discovery update page.

• Cabral v. Ralphs Grocery Company, S178799, addresses whether a big-rig truck driver owes a duty of care to freeway motorists not to park for non-emergency reasons in an “Emergency Parking Only” area at the side of a freeway. Review was also granted on the issue of whether the driver’s act of parking in the “Emergency Parking Only” area was not a substantial factor, as a matter of law, in causing plaintiff’s injuries in this case. For more details regarding Cabral, see the Torts & Products update page.

• In re Baycol Cases I and II, S178320, the Court addresses whether the “death knell doctrine” requires plaintiff to immediately appeal the sustaining of a demurer as to class claims when the ruling resolved both individual and class claims, or whether the one final judgment rule applies and requires a single appeal from the subsequent entry of final judgment on all claims? For more details regarding Baycol, see the Appeals & Writs update page.
   

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Justice Carlos Moreno of the California Supreme Court announced today that he will be retiring from the Court, effective February 28, 2011.  The surprise announcement, coming on the heels of Chief Justice Ronald M. George's retirement, gives new Governor Jerry Brown his first Supreme Court appointment only days into his term.

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From the late 1990’s, a wave of litigation and controversy has washed over the public health debate concerning the alleged connection between the then widely-used childhood MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccine and autism.  Beyond the scores of lawsuits, including class actions, the whirlwind drove down the vaccination rate (because concerned parents’ reservations about vaccine safety), which in turn increased the rate of disease and corresponding bumps in the morbidity and mortality tables.

The genesis of this maelstrom was a February, 1998 article in the prestigious medical journal Lancet, by Dr. Andrew Wakefield, M.D.  Unknown to the journal’s editors, Dr. Wakefield had been on retainer for a British solicitor, Richard Barr, for two years prior to the article’s publication, and ultimately Mr. Barr paid Dr. Wakefield well over half a million dollars, plus expenses.  Their apparent objective was to establish a temporal association between vaccination and the onset of autism, to foment litigation against the MMR industry.  Beyond the public disgrace, this gambit cost Dr. Wakefield his medical license, forced the Lancet to withdraw and repudiate the article, and tarnished the reputations of other researchers associated with the article.

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