The Review · Case Index

California employment case index

Search every indexed California wrongful-termination and employment decision, or browse by subject area, statute, and decade — each summary source-verified against the published reporter.

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6 cases

Carranza v. City of Los Angeles: § 12923, Single Incidents, and Harassment the Plaintiff Never Saw

May 23, 2025
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.

Wawrzenski v. United Airlines — comparator evidence is for the jury: the marquee MSJ reversal on FEHA discrimination, harassment, and retaliation

October 22, 2024
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.

Castellanos v. State of California: The Supreme Court Upholds Proposition 22 and Holds the Legislature’s Article XIV Workers’-Compensation Power Is Not Exclusive of the Initiative

July 25, 2024
The California Supreme Court unanimously upholds Proposition 22 (Bus. & Prof. Code, § 7451), holding that the Legislature’s “plenary” and “unlimited” authority over workers’ compensation under article XIV, section 4 is not exclusive of the people’s reserved initiative power — while expressly reserving the harder questions about Proposition 22’s seven-eighths amendment rule.

Williams v. Chino Valley Independent Fire Dist.

May 4, 2015
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,…

Mokler v. County of Orange — Whistleblower Retaliation, Waived Exhaustion, and a Harassment Holding Overtaken by § 12923

November 26, 2007
The Fourth District affirmed a whistleblower-retaliation verdict for an Office on Aging director fired after warning that a County reorganization was unlawful — holding the County waived its exhaustion defense by first raising it after trial — while reversing her sexual-harassment claim under the pre-§ 12923 "severe or pervasive" standard and affirming a remittitur-backed new trial order on damages.

Flannery v. Prentice

August 13, 2001
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.