California employment case index

An employee with an undisclosed bipolar diagnosis was fired after two episodes of erratic, irrational behavior at work, then sued Target under FEHA. The Second District affirms summary judgment: employer knowledge is a prerequisite to FEHA disability liability, and it is imputed only when disability is the “only reasonable interpretation” of the conduct — not where intoxication, medication, or sleep deprivation could equally explain it.

Two Chico State physics professors sued the CSU Trustees for retaliation, alleging a sham investigation and sabotage of their move to a new university after they reported harassment. The Trustees moved to strike the claims under the anti-SLAPP statute as “based in part” on protected speech. The Third District affirms denial: a movant must analyze each claim element-by-element and identify which acts are protected — “based in part” is not enough.

A nursing student said the faculty member running her hospital clinical rotation sexually harassed her and tanked her grade when she refused him. The Fourth District holds a student in a required clinical placement is an “unpaid intern” protected by FEHA, and reverses summary judgment on standing, Government-Claims-Act notice, and deliberate indifference.

A coworker’s off-site sexual advances were not work-related and not imputable to the employer — yet the Fifth District held the employee still stated a FEHA hostile-work-environment claim, because the employer’s refusal to act and its HR representative’s mocking response could independently alter the workplace in an objectively severe manner. A pleading-stage reversal that imports the Ninth Circuit’s totality-of-the-circumstances, employer-response framework (Fuller, Okonowsky) into California law.

The University of California refuses to employ undocumented students who lack federal work authorization. The First District held that the policy facially discriminates based on immigration status under the FEHA national-origin regulations, and that the University’s only justification — fear that the federal government might read IRCA to cover it and prosecute — could not sustain the policy, because the University never attempted the regulation’s clear-and-convincing showing that federal law requires the discrimination. The court issued a writ directing the Regents to reconsider the policy on proper criteria, while pointedly declining to decide whether IRCA applies to state entities at all.

Must a California employer accommodate an employee who is not disabled but who cares for someone who is? Castro-Ramirez said in 2016 that FEHA “may reasonably be interpreted” to require it — and expressly declined to decide. Nine years on, no published California decision has answered, the Civil Rights Council’s 2020 request for public input produced no regulation, and CACI 2547 still calls the element optional. Meanwhile five federal district courts — Castro v. Classy, McVay, and 2025’s Acosta, Head, and De Wit — have all held that failure-to-accommodate and interactive-process claims may rest on associational disability. This analysis maps the statutory argument, the unpublished contrary authority, and how to plead the caregiver’s claim while the question stays open.

When a trial court takes an across-the-board percentage cut to a prevailing plaintiff’s lodestar, must it explain why that particular percentage — or is a general finding of overlitigation enough? Warren demanded case-specific explanation and Snoeck brought that rule into FEHA; Morris rejected it as imported federal law, and Cash v. County of Los Angeles — a 30 percent, $195,234 haircut affirmed over Justice Baker’s meat-cleaver dissent — squarely joined Morris. The Supreme Court granted review on August 20, 2025 (S291827). Until it rules, Cash is persuasive-only under rule 8.1115(e)(1), the published split remains live, and the smart fee motion is built to win under either standard — starting with a written request for specific findings.

An LAPD captain never witnessed officers passing around a fake nude photo of her and was never confronted to her face — yet the Second District affirmed a $4 million FEHA verdict, holding that her secondhand knowledge of the department-wide circulation, and the LAPD’s refusal to stop it, supplied substantial evidence of a severe or pervasive hostile work environment. A leading application of Government Code section 12923.

After a harbor patrol officer’s on-duty accident left him unable to work, the Port San Luis Harbor District told him retirement was his “single option” — then denied his CalPERS disability-retirement application and terminated him on a resignation theory it later admitted was false. Division Six affirmed summary judgment on his FEHA claim anyway: denial of disability-retirement payments is not an adverse employment action, because retirement benefits begin when employment ends, and a claimant who cannot perform his essential duties is not a “qualified individual” under Green. The remedy for a wrongful denial is an appeal to the Office of Administrative Hearings and administrative mandamus — a route Lowry lost by following a repealed procedure.

Reversing summary judgment for United Airlines, the Court of Appeal held that whether three male employees with comparable social-media accounts were "similarly situated" comparators was a question for the jury, applied the continuing violation doctrine and section 12923's low bar to the harassment claim, and found a two-week complaint-to-termination gap sufficient for retaliation causation.

Charter’s mandatory arbitration agreement directed employees’ claims into arbitration while carving out the claims Charter itself would bring, compressed FEHA filing to the one-year administrative window, and made anyone who unsuccessfully resisted arbitration pay the fees incurred to compel it. The Supreme Court held all three terms substantively unconscionable — but validated the four-deposition discovery cap, disapproving the line of cases that judged discovery limits by a particular plaintiff’s later needs. On remedy, the court rejected clause-counting: severance is a qualitative, totality inquiry under Armendariz, and the refusal to enforce was reversed and remanded for that analysis.

In Hoglund v. Sierra Nevada Memorial-Miners Hospital (2024) 102 Cal.App.5th 56, a 62-year-old hospital laboratory supervisor won a bench verdict for FEHA age discrimination, harassment, and wrongful termination after her director made years of ageist remarks and steered her selection for layoff. The Court of Appeal affirmed. Applying the “cat's-paw” (imputed-animus) theory, it held that a biased subordinate's discriminatory motive may be imputed to the employer where the subordinate was a “significant participant” in the adverse decision — even though a separate, formally unbiased officer signed off on the final call. Animus by a significant participant supports an inference that the decision itself was discriminatory.

In the first California decision to articulate the elements of a reasonable-accommodation claim under the Pregnancy Disability Leave Law (Gov. Code, § 12945, subd. (a)(3)(A)), the Court of Appeal held that a plaintiff must prove a pregnancy-related condition, a request made on her health care provider's advice, the employer's refusal of a reasonable accommodation, and that she could perform the essential functions of the job with that accommodation. Although section 12945 affords protections over and above section 12940, none entitles an employee to a job she cannot perform. Judgment for the employer affirmed.

A Rite Aid district manager sent a staff pharmacist lewd photos in a late-night, off-site text exchange that grew out of a friendship predating her employment. The Fifth District affirmed summary judgment for the employer, holding that FEHA strict liability for supervisor harassment attaches only when the supervisor acts “in the capacity of supervisor,” not where the conduct arises from a completely private relationship — and that the plaintiff, invited back after the harasser was fired, was not constructively discharged.

A unanimous Court of Appeal reversed summary judgment for Kaiser, holding that even though the employer granted every accommodation the employee requested, it could still be liable for failing to accommodate and failing to engage in the interactive process because, through her supervisor, it knew of but never provided a needed lighter-tasks accommodation. The court also reinstated the disability-discrimination and retaliation claims on a cat’s-paw theory.

When a medical resident sues her residency program for discrimination, the program's 'academic' justification for dismissing her is not entitled to the deference courts extend to genuine academic judgments. The Second District held that a resident is predominantly an employee, not a student, so the jury must evaluate the program's real reason without deference — and the contrary instruction required a new trial.

An employer cannot rebut a discrimination plaintiff’s prima facie case by professing ignorance: stage-two production under McDonnell Douglas demands the actual nondiscriminatory reason for a failure to interview, not a witness’s “I don’t know.”

In the Sixth District's treatise-level employment-MSJ opinion, a security supervisor laid off days before his expected return from knee surgery revives his disability discrimination and wrongful termination claims — the employer's RIF showing was inadequate under Guz's "roadmap" because it never explained retaining two lower-ranked supervisors, and its failure to accommodate, the timing, and an overpayment vendetta were substantial evidence of animus — while the retaliation claim fails because pre-2016 accommodation requests were not protected activity.

The Court of Appeal held that a plaintiff suing for failure to engage in the interactive process under Government Code section 12940, subdivision (n) must prove a reasonable accommodation was actually available. Substantial evidence supported finite leave as an available accommodation for the plaintiff’s carpal-tunnel (wrist) injury, but none supported any accommodation for her later shoulder injury. Because the general verdict did not reveal which disability the jury relied on, the judgment was reversed for a limited retrial.

A 60-year-old engineer cut in a 306-person, budget-driven layoff lost on both procedure and merits: his EEOC and post-closure DFEH amendments could not exhaust class and disparate-impact theories, and his pretext case failed for want of combined-position qualifications, controlled statistics, and comparators.

The California Supreme Court held that a nonsupervisory coworker could not be held personally liable under FEHA for harassing a fellow employee: although former Government Code section 12940 prohibited “any … person” from harassing an employee, the statute as a whole reached only the employer's failure to take corrective action, not the coworker's underlying conduct. The court pointed the policy question to the Legislature — which responded the next year by adding Government Code section 12940, subdivision (j)(3), making individual employees personally liable for their own harassment and abrogating the holding.

A steelworker fired months after testifying in a coworker’s asbestos case revived his public-policy and FEHA disability claims: they required no CBA interpretation, his union could not waive his judicial forum, and coworker evidence that the termination-night incident was staged made pretext a jury question.

Affirming a remitted $500,000 FEHA retaliation judgment for a Nigerian-American harbor-department engineer, the Second District held that pretext may be shown by direct evidence of decisionmakers' retaliatory remarks and by comparative evidence of disparate treatment — not only by a head-on attack on the employer's stated performance reasons — and that lay testimony alone can support a substantial emotional-distress award.

Affirming summary judgment for the employer, the Court of Appeal held in the published portion of this opinion that a finite leave of absence can be a reasonable accommodation under FEHA, “provided it is likely that at the end of the leave, the employee would be able to perform his or her duties.” On undisputed facts the employer had accommodated its injured meatcutter twice — sixteen months of leave (nearly double the CBA's nine) and an offer of a vacant part-time position — so it need not also furnish the hand brace and other measures the employee preferred. The interactive-process discussion has since been overtaken by the Legislature's addition of an independent interactive-process duty (Gov. Code, § 12940, subd. (n)).

A remedial injunction prohibiting an employer (and a supervisor adjudicated to have engaged in unlawful racial harassment) from continuing to use racial epithets in the workplace against the plaintiff employees is permissible and does not constitute an unconstitutional prior restraint, because it enjoins speech only…

Affirming summary judgment on a 59-year-old communications manager's age claim, the First District adopted Hersant's substantial-evidence pretext standard, gave the same-actor inference "strong" force across a five-year span, and discounted a non-decisionmaker's isolated remark — making Horn the case every California employment plaintiff must be ready to distinguish.

In one of California's first published workplace racial-harassment decisions under FEHA, the Court of Appeal affirmed a defense verdict, holding that the trial court properly instructed jurors that “occasional, isolated, sporadic, or trivial” racial conduct is not actionable and importing the federal Title VII “severe or pervasive” threshold into state law.

Section 132a does not provide an exclusive remedy; an employee may pursue FEHA disability-discrimination and common-law wrongful-termination claims notwithstanding the availability of a section 132a remedy.

Reversing summary judgment in a FEHA failure-to-promote case, the Ninth Circuit reconciled its competing pretext lines — direct evidence of bias needs only "very little" weight to reach a jury, while circumstantial evidence must be "specific" and "substantial" — a formulation later questioned after Desert Palace but still central to MSJ briefing on both sides.

The FEHA allows employees to sue and hold liable their employers, but not individual supervisors, for discrimination; the same rule applies to common-law claims for wrongful discharge (id. at p. 643).

In Beyda v. City of Los Angeles (1998) 65 Cal.App.4th 511, the Second District affirmed a defense judgment, holding that a hostile-environment claim requires conduct that is both objectively and subjectively offensive, and that harassment directed at other employees is relevant only where the plaintiff was aware of it—conduct she neither witnessed nor knew about could not have altered the conditions of her own employment.

An undocumented assembler bought false papers to get hired, then sued for relentless sexual harassment. The employer's only defense was after-acquired evidence of her document fraud. Following McKennon, the Court of Appeal reversed: after-acquired evidence is no complete bar to a FEHA harassment claim, an undocumented worker keeps full employment-law protection while employed, and the defense's factual predicate — whether the employer in fact would have fired her — is a jury question.

The Fifth District affirmed summary judgment and a $64,796.50 defense fee award against a correctional counselor whose gender-bias case rested on "perception" rather than proof — writing the evidentiary rulebook for MSJ oppositions: admissible, specific, personal-knowledge evidence (and record citations on appeal), or nothing.

In Weeks v. Baker & McKenzie (1998) 63 Cal.App.4th 1128, the Court of Appeal affirmed a FEHA sexual-harassment verdict for a legal secretary against a partner and his international law firm, sustaining punitive damages under Civil Code section 3294. The court applied section 3294, subdivision (b)'s managing-agent and ratification requirements to hold the firm liable for the partner's harassment and upheld the punitive award against constitutional challenge.

The Court of Appeal affirmed judgment notwithstanding the verdict for the employer, holding that a jury finding of failure to take reasonable steps to prevent discrimination and harassment cannot stand where the same jury found, by special verdict, that no discrimination, harassment, or retaliation actually occurred. A failure-to-prevent claim is derivative: there must be an underlying actionable wrong to prevent.

In Hersant v. Department of Social Services (1997) 57 Cal.App.4th 997, the Court of Appeal affirmed summary judgment for an employer in a FEHA age-discrimination case, adopting the rule that once an employer offers a legitimate, non-age-based reason for an adverse action, the employee must offer substantial evidence that the reason is untrue or pretextual, or evidence of discriminatory animus, or a combination, and not merely triable issues about whether the decision was sound.

Reversing summary judgment for the hospital, Division One held that a registry nurse's point-by-point factual dispute, the employer's conclusory comparative-qualifications showing, and the decisionmaker's anti-Mexican remarks created triable issues of discrimination and retaliation — and that the FEHA's antiretaliation provision protects job applicants, including one whose injury was the loss of temporary contract work.

In Mullins v. Rockwell International Corp. (1997) 15 Cal.4th 731, a long-tenured manager who resigned after a demotion and a steady erosion of his responsibilities sued for constructive discharge in contract; the trial court and Court of Appeal held his claims time-barred, running the limitations period from the date he learned of the adverse changes. A unanimous Supreme Court reversed. Extending its reasoning in Romano v. Rockwell, the court held that the limitations period for a contract action based on constructive discharge runs from the date of actual termination of employment — the resignation — not from the onset of, or the employee's knowledge of, the intolerable conditions. Because the breach alleged is termination without good cause, and an employee who continues to perform retains an election of remedies, the cause of action accrues only upon resignation. The court disapproved Regents of University of California v. Superior Court to the extent inconsistent.

Prilliman v. United Air Lines, Inc.An employer who knows of an employee’s disability has an affirmative duty to make known available, suitable job opportunities and to determine whether the employee is interested and qualified — not merely to wait for the employee to ask.Prilliman v. United Air Lines, Inc. (1997) 53 Cal.App.4th 935Parallel citation: 62 […]

A conservative Jewish airline employee fired for refusing to work the first day of Passover sued under FEHA for religious discrimination, retaliation, and failure to accommodate. The Court of Appeal reversed summary judgment, holding the claims were not RLA-preempted 'minor' disputes and that a collective bargaining agreement does not, in the abstract, discharge an employer's duty to accommodate where the employer did nothing to explore alternatives. Any reasonable accommodation suffices, but the employer must actually offer one.

The Court of Appeal affirmed judgment on the pleadings for a second-tier supervisor sued only for failing to act on a harassment complaint, holding that a nonharassing supervisor is not personally liable under FEHA — not as an aider and abettor of the harasser or employer, and not as the employer's agent — and distilling supervisor liability into three clear rules.

An aspiring actor alleged a casting director drugged and gang-raped him at the director's home. The Court of Appeal held the director could be treated as the network's agent, triggering FEHA strict liability rather than the negligence standard for coworkers, and that the off-site, off-hours assault was sufficiently work-related to be actionable — while affirming dismissal of the negligent-hiring claim.

Individual supervisors are not personally liable under the FEHA for discrimination, which arises out of the necessary personnel-management functions of the employer; by contrast, harassment — conduct outside the scope of necessary job performance and presumably engaged in for personal gratification or bias — can give…

In Proksel v. Gattis (1996) 41 Cal.App.4th 1626, the Court of Appeal held that an employer's favoritism toward a coworker with whom he is romantically involved does not, without more, give rise to a sex discrimination or sexual harassment claim under FEHA or California public policy — declining to make courts a generalized police power over consensual office relationships.

A school administrator lost his FEHA age- and race-discrimination claims at trial, then won a new trial when the judge decided he had mis-instructed the jury on the McDonnell Douglas prima facie burden. The Court of Appeal reversed, holding the prima facie and rebuttal stages are questions of law for the court, not the jury: once the employer articulates a legitimate reason, the burden-shifting construct drops from the case and only the ultimate question of discriminatory intent reaches the jury.

Nine days after Fatmeh Badih told her employer — a physician with fewer than five employees — that she was pregnant, her last day was set; the DFEH would not even accept her complaint because the office was too small for the FEHA. Division One of the First District affirmed her wrongful-discharge verdict anyway, holding that pregnancy discrimination is a form of sex discrimination under article I, section 8 of the California Constitution, whose fundamental public policy against sex discrimination in employment binds every employer regardless of size. Jennings v. Marralle was distinguished, not disturbed: age has no constitutional anchor, but sex — and therefore pregnancy — does. Badih remains the pleading answer for pregnancy discharges at California's smallest workplaces.

A married couple fired by a law firm sued for wrongful termination, but the firm discovered during litigation that both had concealed felony convictions. The Court of Appeal affirmed summary judgment: their at-will acknowledgments doomed the contract claims, and the after-acquired-evidence doctrine barred the statutory and public-policy claims because the Camps had misrepresented a government-imposed job qualification, leaving them unlawfully unqualified for the position. Camp marks the point where after-acquired evidence shifts from limiting remedies to barring recovery outright.

In a same-sex sexual-harassment action under FEHA, the trial court sustained the individual defendants' demurrers on the theory that only the employer can be liable. The Court of Appeal granted a writ of mandate, holding that 'persons' under Government Code section 12965 includes individuals, so a harassment claimant may sue the supervisors who personally participated in or aided and abetted the conduct. Harassment by a supervisor with hire-and-fire power is a particularly personal form of discrimination, distinct from hiring discrimination, for which the employer alone answers.

The Sixth District's 1994 decision translated McDonnell Douglas burden-shifting into Code of Civil Procedure section 437c practice — affirming summary judgment for Lockheed where a laid-off 65-year-old answered a documented reduction in force with speculation rather than "substantial responsive evidence," and holding that EEOC-only filings did not exhaust DFEH remedies.

A 10-year employee sued for wrongful discharge and age discrimination; the employer then discovered application misrepresentations made nearly a decade earlier and won summary judgment on the theory that the fraud forfeited all remedies. The Court of Appeal reversed, declining to adopt a blanket rule that material application falsification is a complete defense to a claim the employer did not know about when it fired the worker. The first published California decision on the point, Cooper anticipated the Supreme Court's McKennon by less than a year.

In Kelly-Zurian v. Wohl Shoe Co. (1994) 22 Cal.App.4th 397, the Court of Appeal carried Harris v. Forklift Systems into California's FEHA, holding that harassment need not seriously affect a plaintiff's psychological well-being to be actionable. It confirmed that an employer is strictly liable in compensatory damages for a supervisor's harassment, but held that punitive damages run only through Civil Code section 3294's managing-agent test — which a supervisor with hiring-and-firing power, but no policymaking discretion, did not satisfy.

A male creative editor alleged that his male supervisor subjected him to quid pro quo and hostile-environment sexual harassment. Sustaining the complaint, the Court of Appeal held that FEHA’s prohibition on sexual harassment reaches same-gender conduct: the statute protects against harassment “because of sex” regardless of whether harasser and victim are of the same sex.

The Court of Appeal affirmed a multimillion-dollar FEHA sexual-harassment judgment, holding that AT&T's concealment of the harasser's lost personnel file justified a willful-suppression instruction, and that sexual harassment is a personal injury supporting prejudgment interest. The decision is a leading authority on respondeat-superior liability for harassment and on the adverse inference from spoliated employment records.

A Black assistant professor denied tenure won a jury verdict for race discrimination under FEHA, and the Court of Appeal affirmed in the published portion of its opinion. The court held the verdict was supported by substantial evidence and that a tenure plaintiff need not prove intentional discrimination at every stage of a multilevel review: discrimination at one level can infect the ultimate decision. On causation, racial animus need not be the sole motivation, only a but-for cause of the adverse decision.

In a foundational FEHA retaliation opinion, the Court of Appeal held that a supervisor who confronts a fellow manager over sexual harassment of a subordinate engages in protected activity based on a reasonable, good-faith belief — whether or not harassment is ultimately proved — and reversed summary adjudication where the confronted harasser himself made the termination decision four months later.

The FEHA does not displace other state-law remedies, including common-law claims, for employment discrimination; an employee need not exhaust FEHA’s administrative process before pursuing nonstatutory causes of action; and sex discrimination in employment may support a tort claim for wrongful discharge in…

In Johnson Controls, Inc. v. Fair Employment & Housing Com. (1990) 218 Cal.App.3d 517, the Court of Appeal struck down a fetal-protection policy barring fertile women from lead-exposed battery jobs as overt sex discrimination under FEHA. The court articulated California's two-part bona fide occupational qualification test — the sex-based qualification must be reasonably necessary to the normal operation of the business, and the employer must show that all or substantially all of the excluded class cannot safely and efficiently perform the job — and held the employer failed both prongs.