In Search of Administrative Finality

Jackson v. Board of Civil Service Comm’rs of the City of L.A., No. B328414 (D2d7 Feb. 8, 2024)

This one is pretty deep into the weeds in the intersection of administrative law and appellate jurisdiction. But since I have a case before the Supreme Court in that same neighborhood, it’s interesting to me, at least.

Petitioner is an LAPD Officer who got disciplined for being late to a shift under what sound like some not so great circumstances. He was suspended from duty for 10 days. He challenged the suspension administratively, and when he lost, filed an administrative appeal, which he also lost. 

Officer filed a petition for writ of administrative mandate in LA Superior, raising sufficiency of the evidence and due process issues regarding the administrative process because LAPD’s justification for the discipline apparently evolved over the course of the administrative hearings. The superior court found that the evidence supported three of the four charges but that the administrative process had failed in some respects to appropriately account for Petitioner’s due process rights as a public employee. It remanded to the administrative system to address that issue. Petitioner appealed.

A threshold question on appeal is whether the trial court’s remand to the administrative process counts as a “final judgment” that can be appealed under Code of Civil Procedure § 904.1(a). That would seem to be an easy question because there’s a 2017 Supreme Court decision that held that a judgment that remands to the agency is sufficiently final to be appealable. Dhillon v. John Muir Health, 2 Cal. 5th 1109 (2017). But the Court here finds Dhillon to be distinguishable. 

As the Court sees it, Dhillon found finality for two reasons. First, in Dhillon, the superior court’s remand decided everything before it. It didn’t reserve any issues for itself during the remand. That’s true here as well.

But Dhillon’s second basis for finding finality had to do with the particular procedural posture of that case. There, a hospital’s administrative review board was reviewing the discipline of a physician. The review board determined that the physician was not entitled to receive a hearing. On a writ of administrative mandate, the superior court disagreed and remanded for the hearing to be held. In that case, the Supreme Court explained, if the remand order weren’t appealable, the hospital would have no avenue to review the superior court’s order that a hearing was required. 

The Court here finds that to be a distinguishing factor. Here, following the remand, the Officer will be able to file a new or renewed writ petition, and, should that be decided against him, appeal any adverse ruling subsumed into a post-remand judgment. See generally Code of Civ. Proc. § 906 (appeal of final judgment permits review of any intermediate ruling, provided that ruling substantially affected the appellant’s rights). That includes issues affirmed by the superior court on this petition. The Court relies on a pre-Dhillon Court of Appeal opinion—Kumar v. National Medical Enterprises, Inc. (1990) 218 Cal. App. 3d 1050—that makes that very point. As the Court notes, although there is some superficial tension, the Supreme Court distinguished Kumar on the same ground the Court here is distinguishing Dhillon. In this case and in Kumar, the petitioner whose case is administratively remanded will ultimately have an opportunity to appeal anything adversely decided.

The Court finds all this to be consistent with federal practice, which, although not identical to California’s, nonetheless applies analogous principles in assessing the finality of administrative action for appeal. In doing so, the Court notes that in this context, the agency sometimes has the right to appeal a remand order, but the affected individual, almost never does.

Finally, although the Court has the discretion to treat a premature appeal as a writ petition, it declines to do so here. This is not a case of great public interest. It is, instead, a largely fact-bound question regarding the manner in which the Officer was disciplined. So the Officer needs to wait for a ripe appeal.

Appeal dismissed.