California employment case index

Cambodian villagers forced to work at Thai seafood factories sued a U.S. marketer under the trafficking civil-remedy statute; their case was dismissed because the statute then reached only those who succeeded in benefiting, not those who attempted to. After Congress amended the law, the en banc Ninth Circuit holds the clarifying amendment retroactive — and that Landgraf governs all such amendments, overruling the “clarifying amendment” exception — reviving the claims.

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.

Reversing summary judgment for the UC Regents, the Second District mapped the post-Lawson landscape — Labor Code § 1102.6 governs § 1102.5 claims, Government Code § 8547.10(e) supplies the same framework for University of California whistleblowers, and McDonnell Douglas still governs Health and Safety Code § 1278.5 claims, under which Scheer's clause-by-clause dismantling of his termination letter raised a triable issue of pretext.