App. Div. Extravaganza

Wong v. Markarian, No. BV033189 (L.A. Super. App. Div. Jul. 29, 2022)

Arche v. Scallon, No. BV033632 (L.A. Super. App. Div. Aug. 1, 2022)

These are two decisions by the L.A. Superior Appellate Division in limited civil unlawful detainer cases. There isn’t anything of procedural significance to the substance of the opinions. That said, their publication is procedurally significant.

Having done bunch of pro bono UD cases over the course of the pandemic, several things have become clear: 

(1) UD law is both procedurally and substantively complicated. Like as hard as habeas or immigration. Procedurally, the statutory scheme is not the clearest, and everything is designed to work so fast that it’s often tough to get up to speed on how things work. And substantively, landlord tenant law is a jumbled mix of state statutory provisions (seemingly randomly strewn across the codes), (often badly drafted) county or locality ordinances, and common law rules.

(2) It’s gotten even more complicated during the pandemic. At any one time, there were federal, state, county, and city tenant protections. Each of these had its own specific and repeatedly amended eligibility requirements, limitations, and applicable dates. And an added layer of rental assistance law emerged about a year in.   

(3) A significant proportion of UD litigants are pro ses. Those who aren’t are often represented by attorneys working under pressing budgetary constraints, be they legal service organizations, or private landlord or tenant counsel. 

(4) There is very little case law on anything. Basic questions that must by their very nature, have come up all the time remain unanswered. To the extent there is anything, it’s often very old. 

I just tried a case where the issue was the rights of a principal landlord against a known, but potentially not expressly authorized, subtenant, in light of the state and LA City COVID protections and rental assistance rules. Our best case was from 1911. 

Or last year, the Supreme Court decided an important procedural question about motions to quash that touches on almost every case. In doing so, it resolved a split of authority that had been pending for seven years.

(5) There is an enormous volume of this litigation statewide. Like thousands of cases per year.

Which is all a long way of saying that to the extent UD cases get appealed, the courts deciding them, be they a local appellate division in a limited civil or the Court of Appeal in an unlimited, should try hard to publish more. I would be willing to lay odds that essentially any UD case that makes it to an appeal presents at least one legal or procedural issue that satisfies Rule 8.1105(c)’s publication criteria. 

So the fact that the L.A. App. Div. published two cases decided within a week—each addressing a difficult-to-parse local ordinance—is something to be commended.