California Corporate & Securities Law

Section 2(a) of the Lanham Act bars the Patent and Trademark Office from registering scandalous, immoral, or disparaging marks. 15 U.S.C. § 1052(a).  However, the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit sitting en banc recently held...

Three years ago, I wrote this brief post about how to interpret an indemnity claim. I wrote that post to remind readers that the California Civil Code not only defines "indemnity", it provides a series of interpretational rules. According to the...

Secondary trading of securities in California must be qualified unless exempt or not subject to qualification due to federal preemption. Cal. Corp. Code § 25130. Similarly, the offer and sale of securities are subject to registration under the...

A reader of the California Constitution would be lead to believe that the course of legislation is orderly and predictable. Under Article IV, Section 8(b), the legislature may make no law except by statute and no statute except by bill. Every bill,...

On Friday, the Securities and Exchange Commission staff published a report of its review of the definition of "accredited investor". Congress directed the SEC to review the definition every four years in Section 413(b)(2)(A) of the Dodd-Frank Wall...

Can an in-house lawyer have sexual relations with his or her client?  To answer this question, it is necessary to identify the lawyer's client.  The California Rules of Professional Conduct provide a clear answer to this question:

Can a party to written agreement that does not include an arbitration clause enforce an arbitration provision in another agreement to which it is not a party? Boiled down to the essentials, this is the question decided yesterday by the Court of...

Corporations Code Section 313 generally provides that a contract, note or other instrument will not be invalidated as to a corporation by any lack of authority if it is signed by the corporation's chairman of the board, the president or any vice...

Readers may remember this blog post from September of last year: Nevada Supreme Court Upholds Fraud Verdict Against The California Franchise Tax Board.  The subject of the post was Franchise Tax Bd. v. Hyatt, 335 P.3d 125 (Nev. 2014) in which the...