The Ninth Circuit regularly asks the Supreme Court to decide questions of California law under rule 8.548. And the Supreme Court is almost always obliging. (E.g., here.)
But sometimes a federal appeals court panel disagrees about whether to impose on the state court’s docket and comes up a vote short of referring a case. (E.g., here.) Like yesterday.
In Bayes v. State Farm General Insurance Company, Judge Johnnie Rawlinson and an assigned district court judge believed a 2010 Supreme Court opinion was clear enough to defeat a claim that a childcare facility’s insurance policy provided coverage for the molestation of the plaintiff’s child by the adult son of the facility’s owner. Not so fast, said Judge Carlos Bea in dissent. According to him, the 2010 opinion’s reasoning “forecloses the facile conclusion the majority reaches today,” and he would send the case to the Supreme Court “[i]n the face of conflicting federal district court decisions and a quandary caused by the California Supreme Court’s opinion.”
