California employment case index

A former SpaceX employee who lived and worked in Redmond, Washington filed a FEHA complaint in California, and SpaceX refused to answer the Civil Rights Department's investigatory subpoena on the ground that FEHA stops at the state line. The Second District affirmed the order compelling compliance, and in the published portion of its opinion it did two things that matter to every multistate employer and every remote worker. It separated the question of what California connections trigger FEHA's investigatory provisions from the question of what connections trigger its substantive ones, observing that the potential for conflict with other sovereigns is far less when the Department investigates than when it enjoins, so that it is at least conceivable that fewer connections are required to open an investigation than to impose liability. And it refused to read Kearney, or the Tidewater-Sullivan-Ward-Oman wage-and-hour line, as laying down any categorical rule that California's employment laws never protect a worker outside the state, leaving Campbell v. Arco Marine intact but confined to a record in which the California connections were already settled. The court did not hold that FEHA reaches this employee; it held that SpaceX had not shown it cannot. Note that the opinion is published except as to part 2 of the Discussion, which may not be cited.

The Department of Consumer Affairs refused to discuss settlement, refused to stipulate to an amendment, demurred, moved for summary adjudication, rejected a $600,000 section 998 offer and lost a six-week trial – and then appealed the $4,889,786.03 fee award that followed. Division Eight affirmed all of it: top-of-market Los Angeles rates supported by the trial judge's own observation of counsel, a 1.75 multiplier through verdict and 1.25 on the fee litigation, and two holdings with reach – that a fee payable from public funds does not bar an enhancement, and that Ketchum's rule does not apply to FEHA fees, which section 12965 makes discretionary and therefore contingent until the final fee order.

A jury found that the Department of State Hospitals discriminated against Ashley Howell because of a mental disability, and awarded her lost earnings, lost health insurance, and nothing for pain and suffering. By the end of the appeal the insurance award was gone, the zero pain-and-suffering verdict stood, and a $1.75 million attorney fee request had been reduced to $135,102. The insurance award fell because Howell proved an obligation rather than a loss: she introduced a premium invoice she never paid, and she bought no replacement coverage, so there was nothing to compensate. The fee award survived because the trial court could not audit block-billed hours and because the request had grown more than tenfold from counsel's own pretrial estimate. Howell's only appellate win was a remand to rule on the prejudgment interest nobody had opposed. This is an adverse decision, and its value to the plaintiff's bar is as a checklist of what the damages and fee record has to contain.

California religious-accommodation litigation runs on two tracks that are routinely confused, and Groff v. DeJoy answers only one of them. Groff told the lower courts that the de minimis gloss they had drawn from a single line of Hardison does not establish undue hardship, and that an employer must instead show substantial increased costs in relation to the conduct of its particular business — while expressly declining to adopt the ADA's "significant difficulty or expense" standard, which is the very phrase Government Code section 12926, subdivision (u) has long used to define undue hardship under FEHA. This analysis sets the two texts side by side, states precisely what Groff did and did not do to Hardison, traces the collective-bargaining limit through Soldinger, and then marks the point at which none of it matters: where the ministerial exception applies, it is an affirmative defence that removes the claim rather than a weight in the hardship calculus.

FEHA defines both mental and physical disability to include being regarded or treated by the employer as having a condition that makes achievement of a major life activity difficult, and the Legislature enacted those paragraphs by number, expressly notwithstanding Cassista. Gelfo held that the only question under the prong is what the employer believed — no actual disability, no mistake, no myths-or-stereotypes showing — and, breaking with the federal authority then controlling in the Eighth and Ninth Circuits, that a perceived-disability plaintiff is owed reasonable accommodation and the interactive process. Wallace removed animosity from the elements and refused to let an honest mistake count as a legitimate reason; Soria extended the prong to conditions that are merely potentially disabling. What the prong does not do is lower the definitional floor, which is where Higgins-Williams sits — and, as this analysis shows, where the real contest now is.

Government Code section 12965(b) governs both fee and cost awards in FEHA actions and makes them discretionary under the asymmetric Christiansburg standard: a prevailing plaintiff ordinarily recovers fees and costs, but a prevailing defendant may recover them only if the action was objectively frivolous, unreasonable,…

The employee bears the burden of proving he or she is a qualified individual under the FEHA — that is, able to perform the essential duties of the position with or without reasonable accommodation — just as the federal ADA requires; it is not the employer’s burden to disprove qualification.

The FEHA requires only that a physiological disease or condition affecting a body system “limit” — not “substantially limit” — the plaintiff’s ability to participate in a major life activity, a standard broader than the federal ADA; the later Poppink Act merely clarified, and did not change, that existing “limits”…

Attorney fees awarded under section 12965 belong to the attorneys whose services earned them, except to the extent the attorneys and client have entered an enforceable agreement providing otherwise; the portion of a statutory fee award exceeding fees the client already paid does not belong to the client by default.