In a hard-fought dispute between Brentwood neighbors, CALG’s Rex Heinke and Jessica Weisel, along with trial counsel Joel Kozberg, convinced Division Two of the California Court of Appeal’s Fourth District to issue an extraordinary writ of mandate that rejected its own 22-year-old precedent.
The suit centered around one neighbor complaining that the height of another’s trees and hedges violated City of Los Angeles ordinances. The trial court allowed the suit to proceed based on a 2002 decision by Division Four of the Second District, Riley v. Hilton Hotels Corp. Riley held a California statute stating violations of city ordinances may be “redressed by civil action” authorizes any person to bring a civil lawsuit to enforce any city ordinance.
Two decades later, CALG argued — again to Division Four of the Second District — that Riley was wrongly decided. CALG argued that legislative history not considered by Riley reveals that the Legislature intended only to authorize civil actions by city authorities, not private litigants. The City of Los Angeles and the League of California Cities filed a joint amicus curiae brief agreeing with CALG’s analysis.
In issuing the writ, the Court of Appeal acknowledged the importance of following precedent, but nonetheless found this was an “appropriate and rare case” in which to subject a prior opinion to “reexamination and critical analysis.” That exercise led the court to agree with CALG’s conclusions about the statute’s scope.
Persuading a Court of Appeal Division to reject precedent previously issued by the same Division, one that had been followed by several other Districts and Divisions of the Court of Appeal in the intervening decades without question, is extremely challenging.
You can read the Court of Appeal’s opinion in Cohen v. Schwartz by clicking here.