The California Appellate Law Podcast

Are you expecting a lawsuit? And do you want to get that lawsuit into federal court? If your client is domiciled in California, you need to know about “snap removals.” If you get wind of the lawsuit before it is served, you might be able to defeat the removal-bar on home-state defendants.But don’t commit a “super snap” removal. That’s when you remove before the complain

Racial minorities are sometimes removed from prospective juries—just like everybody else. But the Legislature is so concerned that this could happen on the (obviously improper) basis of race that the Racial Justice Act prohibits a challenge to a racial minority even on the basis of proper factors, such as lack of life experience. And if that happens, the Legislature has declared

Every day as an appeals lawyer brings new puzzles. But some puzzles repeat. So in this episode, we compile the top 10 tips dispensed regularly to trial attorneys working in family court. They include:👉 Know your appealable issues—appeal now, or lose it forever!👉 Request a statement of decision. Don’t need to, you say? Judge already gave a tentative opinion, you say? You r

The U.S. Supreme Court provides awaited guidance on public officials’ use of social media, and the California Supreme Court gives a cautionary tale about waiving the right to a jury trial. Jeff and I discuss:📰Free Speech on Government Social Media: Lindke v. Freed (Mar. 15, 2024, No. 22-611), notable for being short and unanimous, holds that, when a public official talks about

Raffi Melkonian has argued and won in the U.S. Supreme Court, and started the #AppellateTwitter community of appellate attorneys on Twitter/X, where he has over 65,000 followers, and speaks and writes on appeals across the country. And Raffi is here to tell you that building a business on an appellate practice—even a very successful one—is very hard to do.We discuss his five ob

We discuss how to avoid appellate sanctions, and an unusually successful motion for reconsideration:$50k sanctions against appellant for blowing appellate procedure.Motion for reconsideration was untimely, but righteous. Trial judge did not take the Court of Appeal’s hint, so writ issued. (But the trial judge was right to let the writ issue.)Anti-SLAPPs don’t require a line-by-

There are 30,000 law clerks in the U.S., and we have no good way to know to judge their experiences. So Judge Douglas Nazarian of the Appellate Court of Maryland—and board member of the Legal Accountability Project—asks judges everywhere to take the LAP Pledge. The Project hosts a growing database of survey responses from judicial clerks, but it needs judges to pledge that they

You thought health and wellness was just for hippies, losers and weirdos. But you were wrong. Leslie Porter explains that if you are waiting for your health issues to become acute enough for a prescription, you are not at your best. Not only are you laying the groundwork for possible big problems down the road, you have lower energy, weakened drive, and diminished alertness.If you

Next time your opposing counsel takes issue with something you say, don’t be surprised to find a complaint in the next filing citing to rule 8.3 of the Rules of Professional Conduct—the new “snitch rule.”There are about a dozen terms of legal art in the snitch rule, so we asked Judge Meredith Jury (Ret.) and Certified Bankruptcy Specialist Stella Havkin what they mean:If yo

Just a few years out of law school, Kyle O’Malley won a landmark case in the Supreme Court of California. The employer’s screening service in *Raines v. US Healthworks Medical Group*, 15 Cal.5th 268 (2023) used a generic questionnaire asking about menstrual cycles, hemorrhoids, hair loss, and all sorts of fool questions not tailored to the specific job (or to any job, for that