California employment case index

For two decades employers have split a single hiring bargain across two pieces of paper: a clean, mutual arbitration agreement, and a separate confidentiality or non-competition agreement that quietly routes the employer's own claims to court. Beginning with Alberto v. Cambrian Homecare in 2023, the Court of Appeal built an answer out of Civil Code section 1642 – documents executed as parts of substantially one transaction are read together, so unconscionability in the companion document is unconscionability in the agreement to arbitrate. In February 2026 the California Supreme Court endorsed that approach in Fuentes v. Empire Nissan, Inc., and added the correction that matters most in practice: a court may not resolve the resulting ambiguity by invoking a policy favouring arbitration. This article states the rule the Alberto-Silva-Gurganus-Cluck line and Fuentes together now supply, and the limits of each.

Three different doctrines collide in public-sector termination cases, and collapsing them is the most expensive mistake in this corner of California employment law. Exhaustion of administrative remedies is a prerequisite to suing at all. Exhaustion of judicial remedies is the separate Westlake requirement that an employee who has already lost before a personnel board overturn that decision by administrative mandamus under Code of Civil Procedure section 1094.5 before suing on the same facts. And collateral estoppel is what happens if the employee does not: the agency's findings become final and bind. Johnson v. City of Loma Linda extended the rule to FEHA while holding it inapplicable to Title VII, Page applied it on demurrer, and Skelly supplies the due-process floor the agency hearing must meet. This analysis keeps the three apart, states what each anchor actually held and how it was disposed of, and sets out the sequencing obligation a practitioner owes a public-employee client at intake.