California Corporate & Securities Law

The word "forfeiture" has an interesting etymology.  It is derived from two Latin words, foris meaning a door or gate, and facere meaningto do. Eventually, the word came to refer to a misdeed punishable by a fine. Today, it used to refer the loss of...

The word "contract" is derived from the Latin word contrahere which means to draw (or drag) together.   The California Civil Code defines a "contract" as "an agreement to do or not to do a certain thing". Cal. Civ. Code § 1549. The estimable Bernard...

VFLA Eventco, LLC v. William Morris Endeavor Entertainment, LLC, 2024 WL (March 6, 2024) involved the loss of $6 million in deposits that had been paid to secure the performances of various artists at a two day musical festival known as Virgin Fest...

Recently, Professor Ann Lipton wrote that the California Supreme Court has granted review of EpicentRx, In.c v. Superior Court, 95 Cal. App. 5th 890 (2023), review granted 539 P.3d 118 (2023).   This was a case that I discussed last September in which...

In California, extortion is a crime.  Section 518 of the Penal Code defines "extortion" as "the obtaining of property or other consideration from another, with his or her consent, or the obtaining of an official act of a public officer, induced by a...

Disputes over whether arbitration may be compelled generally fall into four categories. First, a signatory to an arbitration agreement may seek to compel another signatory to arbitrate. Second, a signatory may seek to compel a nonsignatory to...

The City of Oakland was not happy with the decision of the Oakland Raiders football team to move to Las Vegas, Nevada and it was filed a lawsuit alleging that it was a third party beneficiary of the league's relocation policies. In an opinion...

The California Civil Code includes a number of decidedly gnomic provisions.  Section 1597 is one of these.  It purports to answer the question of what is possible:

Parties exchange drafts of a contract and before signing one party surreptitiously substitutes provisions in the copy to be executed.  Some might call this "promissory fraud", but as Justice William Dato explains in an opinion published yesterday,...