No Jury for PAGA

LaFace v. Ralphs Grocery Co., No. B305494 (D2d4 Feb. 18, 2022)

The key issue in this case is whether the right to jury trial under Article I, section 16 of the state constitution attaches to an action brought under the Labor Code Private Attorney General Act, aka PAGA. Until relatively recently, many aficionados of California procedure, including me, would probably have said yes. A PAGA case, after all, is seeking the recovery of civil penalties, and both older state cases interpreting Article I, section 16, and federal cases interpreting the Seventh Amendment, suggest that an action whose purpose is to penalize arises in law, not equity, and thus carries a jury right.

But then the California Supreme Court decided in Nationwide Biweekly Administration, Inc. v. Superior Court, 9 Cal. 5th 279 (2020), that an action brought by the government seeking civil penalties under the Unfair Competition Law and False Advertising Law, did not provide for a right to jury trial.* Generally, Nationwide Biweekly took some of the focus off of the remedy sought and looked more closely to purpose and structure of the relevant statute to address the law/equity distinction. 

So here, the Court of Appeal says that PAGA is basically a vehicle for a private plaintiff to bring an action that would ordinarily be sought by the Labor Workforce Development Agency before a Labor Commissioner—an administrative proceeding for which there would be no jury right. The fact that the Legislature deputized private plaintiffs to bring such claims in superior court did not fundamentally alter the character of the action as essentially administrative. Moreover, as with the UCL in Nationwide Biweekly, in assessing penalties, the trier of fact in a PAGA case is required to make a discretionary multi-factor analysis to calibrate an appropriate penalty to the facts of the case. That, according to the court, is the type of equitable consideration more appropriately reserved for a court instead of a jury.

Affirmed.

*Failing to get around to writing up the the Supreme Court’s April 30, 2020 decision in Nationwide Biweekly was one of my more notable COVID-era whiffs. What can I say? There was a lot going on at the time...

FWIW, my random GenX music references seem to have been in decline over the last few years. Here’s a great one.