Image via Wikipedia The Supreme Court denied review today in Burlage v. Superior Court, leaving intact the decision that, by speculation of some (including yours truly), will increase the number of legal challenges to arbitration decisions. I won’t go so far as to say that it will “open the floodgates,” but it certainly opens an avenue to judicial review that many would not have tried before the decision was published. Expect to see many challenges that assert, though not in so many words, that the legal error that occurred in their case is grounds for vacating an award if the error led the arbitrator to exclude evidence. The challenge for…
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Reminder: Supreme Court’s Los Angeles office closes for good today
Today is the last day of operation for The California Supreme Court’s Los Angeles clerk’s office, which is closing for budgetary reasons. The press release announcing the closure states that the Supreme Court will continue to schedule oral arguments in Los Angeles, but litigants must now file all documents at the court’s San Francisco clerk’s office.
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Explicit Judicial Requests for Supreme Court Review
Legal Pad highlights a couple of very recent cases, in which the published opinions explicitly urge the Supreme Court to reexamine an issue, in a post titled How Do You Make the Supremes Notice You? Do such explicit requests help the parties obtain review of the Court of Appeal judgment? The post turns to Santa Clara University School of Law Professor Gerald F. Uelmen for comment on that issue.
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Supreme Court Gets Rid of Conflicts by Dismissing Case
Laura Ernde, a staff writer at the Daily Journal, alerted me to her piece in yesterday’s edition of that paper about last week’s dismissal of the Lockheed Litigation Cases, case no. S132167. According to her article, this was one of the oldest matters on the court’s docket and the dismissal comes more than two years after briefing was complete. The dismissal apparently arises out of conflicts of interest. According to the article, four of the seven justices had recused themselves from these five consolidated toxic tort cases because they owned stock in at least one of the oil company defendants. The Supreme Court’s actual order is not posted as a…