The Supreme Court didn’t add any cases to its docket at its Wednesday conference, but the court did make some orders of note, including:
- After the Fifth District Court of Appeal summarily denied the writ petition in Western Oilfields Supply Company v. Superior Court, the Supreme Court granted-and-transferred. [Disclosure: Horvitz & Levy filed the writ petition and the petition for review.] The issue, as phrased in the petition for review is, “After objecting to an e-discovery request as overbroad and unduly burdensome, must an attorney conduct the very review it is objecting to and identify privileged and other protected information before the trial court has ruled on a dispute over the objection?” The Supreme Court directed issuance of an order to show cause “why the trial court did not abuse its discretion by ordering the production of documents without respect to whether they were protected by attorney/client privilege. (See Catalina Island Yacht Club v. Superior Court (2015) 242 Cal.App.4th 1116.)”
- An interesting development in The Turtles case, Flo & Eddie, Inc. v. Pandora Media, Inc.: after agreeing in May 2017 to answer Ninth Circuit questions about California copyright law, after the case being fully briefed for months, and after 11 amicus curiae briefs, the court suggested it might not answer the questions after all. The court asked for supplemental briefing on the effect of recent federal statutory law, the Music Modernization Act (see here), and one of the things it wants to know is whether a preemption provision in the Act makes the resolution of the state law question superfluous to “the outcome of the underlying federal litigation.”
- In a habeas corpus petition raising issues concerning the constitutionality of sentences for crimes committed by juveniles, the court issued an order to show cause, returnable in the Court of Appeal. The petition — In re Bolton — was filed in the Supreme Court in July 2015, and the court twice asked for informal responses. The second request included a reference to the court’s opinion last year in People v. Contreras (2018) 4 Cal.5th 349.
- There were two criminal case grant-and-transfers and the court dismissed review in or transferred a dozen criminal grant-and-hold matters.
