California Law Research Articles

The Fiscal Impacts of Wildfires on California Municipalities

This paper provides some of the first empirical estimates of the impact of natural disasters on the subcomponents of municipal budgets. We combine detailed municipal financial data from 1990-2015 with data on historical wildfire perimeters in California. We find that wildfires increase both revenues and expenditures. Sales taxes temporarily increase. Property taxes increase to a permanently higher level; this appears due to California law that limits reassessments of property until time of sale. Wildfires also cause a long-term increase in local spending on community development and public safety. The overall impact of wildfires on municipal budgets is negative and substantial. That said, in comparison to the spending by state and federal governments on wildfire suppression and response, municipalities are surprisingly insulated from the costs of wildfires.

Implementation and perceived effectiveness of gun violence restraining orders in California: A qualitative evaluation.

BackgroundUptake of gun violence restraining orders (GVROs), which temporarily prohibit the possession and purchase of firearms and ammunition from individuals at particularly high risk of harming themselves or others with a firearm, has been slow and heterogenous across California. Insights into the implementation process and perceived effectiveness of the law could guide implementation in California and the many states that have enacted or are considering enacting such a law.MethodsWe conducted 21 semi-structured interviews with 27 key informants, including judges, law enforcement officers, city and district attorneys, policy experts, and firearm violence researchers. Analysis of transcripts was guided by grounded theory and the Consolidated Framework for Implementation Research (CFIR).FindingsThe following constructs emerged within 4 CFIR domains as salient features of implementation: 1) implementation characteristics: risk of violence, cost, and adaptability; 2) outer setting: interagency coordination and local firearm ideology; 3) inner setting: readiness for implementation and law enforcement firearm culture; and 4) implementation process: planning and engaging with those involved in implementation. Key informants perceived the law to be effective, particularly for preventing firearm suicide, but agreed that more research was needed. While most indicated that the law resulted in positive outcomes, concerns about the potential for class- and race-based inequities were also raised.ConclusionsImplementation of the GVRO law in California was hampered by a lack of funding to support local proactive implementation efforts. This resulted in ad hoc policies and procedures, leading to inconsistent practices and widespread confusion among those responsible for implementation. In states that have not begun implementation, we recommend dedicating funding for implementation and creating local procedures statewide prior to the law’s rollout. In California, recommendations include providing training on the GVRO law—including an explication of agency-specific roles, responsibilities, and procedures—to officers, city attorneys, and civil court judges.

California laws restrict PFAS

California laws restrict PFAS

New California laws restrict products with PFAS

New California laws restrict products with PFAS

The Legal and Institutional Foundations of Silicon Valley’s Technological Innovation: An Interdisciplinary Literature Review

This article reviews interdisciplinary literature to explain how state legislation and the practice of law in California influenced the success of Silicon Valley in creating a startup business culture involving the commercialization of technologies built on venture capital finance. Scholarship has identified four major factors in the rise of Silicon Valley: business culture, symbiotic institutional relations with research universities, California contract and employment law, and Silicon Valley law firm culture. Both law and institutional support have been central to the commercialization of scientific knowledge that is the hallmark of Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley companies have remained leaders in technological innovation for over sixty years, encompassing various technologies from semiconductors to personal computers to the Internet. This entrepreneurial approach to technology continues to this day as exemplified by the successful DoorDash and Airbnb IPOs launched in 2020. The paradigmatic Silicon Valley technology company consists of a small group of entrepreneurs building a start-up technology company funded by a venture capital fund. The venture capitalists (VC) maintain hands-on management of the company and receive seats on the board of director and preferred stock rights. If the business plan is successful, the company offers shares to the public through an initial public offering (IPO), or arranges additional funding from another VC fund. This Silicon Valley model is characterized by a tolerance for failure and high labor mobility. Technology company employees have the freedom to leave established companies to start their own ventures.

Guidance on Navigating Insurance Plans for TMS-Eligible Patients

Guidance on Navigating Insurance Plans for TMS-Eligible Patients

Chicanx histories of the present: a praxis against gang injunctions in Orange County, California, 2008–2016

Chicanxs Unidxs de Orange County (CU) is a community organisation in Southern California. Founded in 2006, CU is small, multigenerational and multi-ethnic. Its organising has focused predominantly on building community power by focusing on local politics, abusive policing and the gentrification of Chicanx neighbourhoods. This article presents an evidence-based narrative of several CU campaigns (primarily between 2008 and 2016). CU’s tactical aggressiveness and strategic pragmatism forced significant changes to ‘civil gang injunctions’ in California. For decades, California law enforcement has used such injunctions to suppress a generation of young people of colour as ‘gang members’. Minors and adults have been prohibited indefinitely from engaging in otherwise legal activities without due process. CU’s emphasis on the longevity of institutionalised and societal racism, rooted in the colonial conquest, resembles arguments associated with critical race theory (CRT) – though CU was not inspired by CRT. CU’s praxis resembles practices of critical pedagogy – though it was not directly modelled on it either. Rather, we argue that CU’s praxis is embedded in the members’ lived experience and study of the local history of racism, community and social movements. All five of this article’s authors were members of CU and were involved in the organising described in this article. The authors wrote this at the request of the CU membership, and it has been discussed and revised by the full membership.

Pesticide Exposure, Systems Biology, and Parkinson’s disease

BACKGROUND AND AIM: Since 1972, California law mandates the recording of all agricultural pesticide use to the pesticide use reports database, documenting nearly 50 years of applications of hundreds of pesticides. METHODS: We developed an untargeted “Pesticide-wide Association Study” approach for handling this vast exposure data in a community-based study of rural Central California residents to assess chronic and long-term health effects. RESULTS:Using this agnostic approach analyzing exposure information for 300 pesticides in a study of Parkinson’s disease (PD) n=1870, we have implicated 33 real-world pesticide profiles most strongly associated with PD (FDR0.01). The strength of this agnostic analysis is that it highlights out of all pesticides used in California the most strongly associated and suggests novel associations. For instance, our top associated pesticide was sodium chlorate (OR=1.26 per log-transformed lbs/acre applied, 95% CI=1.16-1.36, p=1.1e-8), a defoliant sprayed primarily on cotton. Correlation analysis revealed trends of co-applications and exposure clusters, including a cluster of 8 pesticides almost exclusively applied on cotton (97% reported usage). Based on overrepresentation analysis, the organophosphate, organoarsenic, and n-methyl-carbamate classes and the insecticide and solvent types were significantly overrepresented in the group of PD-associated pesticides. Linking the pesticides to tox21, we found these pesticides were linked to various mechanisms of interest in PD, including mitochondrial membrane permeability (enrichment p-value=1.8e-2), xenobiotic homeostasis (p=5.46e-5), and sex hormone homoeostasis (p=3.03e-3). We were further able to implicate PD specific pathways through integrative omics analysis, relating the matrix of PD-associated pesticides to matrices of multiple omic layers (methylome, metabolome, and genome), using systems biology to describe pesticide-associated biologic pathways perturbed more among patients versus controls, and thus contributing to PD even under chronic low-level exposure scenarios. CONCLUSIONS:We developed an exposure assessment approach based on novel tools in the era of big data and omics and implicate new pesticide exposures and biologic pathways in PD. KEYWORDS: Pesticides, systems biology, Parkinson's disease

Consider the Source: Associations between Syringe Sources and Risky Injection Behaviors in California’s Central Valley

Background Sterile syringe access is critical to prevent serious viral and bacterial infections among people who inject drugs (PWID) but many areas across the United States lack sufficient access. Although California law allows nonprescription pharmacy syringe sales and syringe services programs (SSPs), access gaps remain in the largely rural Central Valley. Objective The purpose of this study was to examine syringe access and related injection behaviors among PWID in Fresno, California. Methods We used respondent driven sampling to recruit 494 individuals for a survey about syringe access and injection behaviors between April and September 2016. Participants were ≥18 years old and injected at least twice in the past 30 days. Descriptive statistics examined syringe access and logistic regression determined if discrete syringe source categories were significantly associated with syringe sharing and/or reuse. Results A majority (67%) obtained syringes from an authorized source; SSPs were most common (59%), while few reported pharmacy purchase (14%). Unauthorized sources were even more common (79%), primarily friends (64%) or someone on the street (37%). Compared to PWID who used only authorized sources, those using only unauthorized sources had a higher odds of syringe sharing (AOR = 3.40, 95% CI: 1.66, 6.95) and syringe reuse (AOR = 6.22; 95% CI: 2.24, 17.29), as did those who reported mixed sources (AOR = 3.78; 95% CI: 1.90, 7.54 and AOR = 4.64; 95% CI: 2.08, 10.35). Conclusions Our findings demonstrate a need to expand syringe access in nonurban California to prevent the syringe sharing and reuse that contributes to serious viral and bacterial infections among PWID.

Mental Illness Too Often Wrongly Associated With Gun Violence

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article ProfessionalFull AccessMental Illness Too Often Wrongly Associated With Gun ViolenceKatie O'ConnorKatie O'ConnorSearch for more papers by this authorPublished Online:15 Jun 2021https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.pn.2021.7.23AbstractPeople with mental illness are more likely to be the victims of violence than perpetrators, but mass shootings are often incorrectly associated with psychiatric illnesses. Psychiatrists can help educate the public about evidence-based strategies that reduce gun violence.iStock/zoka74Only 4% of the violence that occurs in the United States can be attributed to people with mental illness, yet when incidents of gun violence occur, they are almost immediately associated with psychiatric illnesses.Words such as “psycho,” “crazy,” and “insane” are often used in media coverage of events such as mass shootings, explained Dhruv Gupta, M.D., a PGY-3 psychiatry resident at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital. That media coverage perpetuates a stigma that people with mental illness are inherently dangerous was addressed by Gupta and his colleagues during the session “Why Blaming Violence on Mental Illness Is Misleading: A Call for Multifaceted and Evidence-Based Strategies to Reduce Gun Violence” at APA’s online 2021 Annual Meeting in May.The presenters pointed out that people with mental illness are far more likely to be the victims of violence than the perpetrators. Research shows that of all the violence that occurs in the United States, 96% is due to risk factors other than mental illness, said Alisa Gutman, M.D., Ph.D., the founder and medical director of the Philadelphia Human Rights Clinic. Referring to mental illness during every conversation about violence “further stigmatizes what is already a marginalized group of individuals who are suffering with severe symptoms,” Gutman said. “That’s unacceptable, and as psychiatrists, we need to take a public stand.”Psychiatrists are often asked to predict who may become perpetrators of violence, but often family members are in a better position to report when an individual may do something violent, says Alisa Gutman, M.D.In some circumstances, psychiatric patients may have a high risk of violence perpetration compared with the general population, including when in emergency departments or involuntarily committed. First-episode psychosis patients also have a higher risk of violence. Yet the risk of violence may be correlated with other systemic concerns, such as poverty, crime victimization, involvement with illegal drugs, and early life trauma, which people with serious mental illness also commonly experience, Gutman explained.“We must ask ourselves: When we’re looking at the perpetration of violence in individuals with serious mental illness, what’s the actual factor here that’s resulting in violent actions?” Gutman said. In most cases, the data support that, outside of high-risk periods, the violence perpetration risk is not higher than that of individuals in the general population, she said.There are a number of risk factors for gun violence, including being young, male, and disadvantaged and misusing drugs or alcohol, explained Jessica Bayner, M.D., a recent graduate of the child and adolescent psychiatry track of the Forensic Psychiatry Fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania. She is a consultant and forensic psychiatrist in Auckland, New Zealand. “Evidence points to the fact that violence risk is better characterized by behaviors than diagnoses,” Bayner said.“While restricting firearm access on the basis of certain dangerous behaviors is supported by evidence, restricting access on the basis of a mental illness diagnosis is not,” says Jessica Bayner, M.D.She pointed to examples of this theory being used effectively to reduce gun violence. A California law passed in 1991 that prohibits firearm ownership among people charged with a violent misdemeanor resulted in a 29% reduction in arrests for new crimes involving guns and other violence. Similarly, cities and states with laws prohibiting people who are subject to domestic violence restraining orders from having guns had 25% fewer intimate-partner homicides.The most prevalent question that audience members asked after the presentation was “Can psychiatrists effectively predict who may commit acts of violence?” “It’s not for us to predict all the violence that will occur,” Gutman said. “Ultimately, the people who spend time with an individual every day, such as family members, are in a better position to notice high-risk times when an individual may become violent.”Yet, Bayner pointed out, as of April 2020, only 19 states and Washington, D.C., had some type of red-flag law, which allows family members to petition a court to temporarily remove firearms from people deemed a danger to themselves or others.Gun violence is a hugely complex issue and requires a variety of stakeholders to address, said Ahmar Mannan Butt, M.D., an adult and child psychiatrist at Broadlawns Medical Center in Des Moines, Iowa. “One discipline cannot address this multifaceted issue,” Butt said. “We need help from all disciplines, and education is the first step.” ■ ISSUES NewArchived

Evolution of Contingency Planning in California – a Federal and State Coordinated Effort

ABSTRACT U.S. Coast Guard (USCG), U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA), and California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW), Office of Spill Prevention and Response (OSPR) agreed to the joint preparation of oil spill contingency plans following the enactment of California and federal laws in 1990. With little guidance initially, six Area Committees embarked on a new process to create the first coastal Area Contingency Plans (ACPs) in 1992. In 2015, when emergency regulations to expand OSPR's jurisdiction statewide became effective, developing inland Geographic Response Plans (GRPs) became a top priority. Over the last 30 years, the ACPs have evolved into robust, nationally recognized planning documents, and response plans have expanded into inland environments. This paper will describe in detail the contributions and advancements in California oil spill contingency planning over 30 years. It will highlight OSPR's approaches for statewide consistency and coverage, interoperability between various state and federal plans, tools (including Geographic Information System (GIS) and various databases), improved sensitive site contacts and management, and lessons learned. It will also cover goals for future improvements in both marine and inland contingency plans.

`‘California Privacy Law: Practical Guide and Commentary US Federal and California Law’ (Fourth Edition)` by Richard Preece

`‘California Privacy Law: Practical Guide and Commentary US Federal and California Law’ (Fourth Edition)` by Richard Preece

Autonomous Vehicle Regulation, Does Tesla's Full Self-Driving Beta Release Comply with Law?

This essay argues that Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) Beta Release qualifies for classification as a Level 3 or 4 capable technology in the Society of Automotive Engineer’s (SAE) classification scheme for levels of vehicle autonomy. Classification as an SAE Level 3 or 4 technology conflicts with Tesla’s own self-characterization of this technology as merely Level 2. Under California laws and regulations governing testing and deployment of autonomous vehicles, classification as an SAE Level 3, 4 or 5 technology would subject Tesla vehicles to stricter regulatory oversight. Tesla’s self-classification avoids this supervision. Significantly, if classified as Level 3 or 4, Tesla’s practice of using a select group of its customers as “beta testers” on public highways for its FSD feature would not comply with law. Given the reality of the FSD Beta Release’s capabilities, state departments of transportation around the United States ought to classify it as an SAE Level 3 or 4 technology, with applicable regulatory and operational guidance applied accordingly. Tesla and the California DMV should work together to qualify the Tesla beta testers in accordance with California law and regulations.

California's Paid Family Leave Law and the Employment of 45-64 Year Old Adults

Paid family leave allows workers to take time off from work to care for a family member with a serious health condition, with reduced financial risk and increased job continuity. In 2004, California was the first state in the nation to implement a paid family leave program allowing workers to take up to eight weeks off work with partial pay to care for their own or a family member's serious health condition. While the effects of California's law on the labor supply of parents of newborns have been extensively studied, the role of paid family leave in the labor supply of workers who may need to provide care for a spouse has not been studied widely. We examine the effects of California's law on the employment of workers who are aged 45-64 and have a disabled spouse, using the 2001-2008 American Community Survey. Our preferred estimates suggest the paid leave program increased the employment of 45-64 year old women with a disabled spouse in California by around 0.9 percentage points (or 1.4% on a pre-law base rate of 65.9%) in the post-law period compared to their counterparts in other states, with a 2.9 percentage point rise in private sector employment. The employment of men with a disabled spouse in California also increased, but by a smaller amount: 0.7 percentage points (or 0.8% on a pre-law base 86.8%) (with a non-significant 0.4 percentage point decrease in private sector employment).

For Whom Corporate Leaders Bargain: Presentation Slides

The presentation slides in this document provide an overview of our study, For Whom Corporate Leaders Bargain, which is forthcoming in the Southern California Law Review. At the center of a fundamental and heated debate about corporate purpose, an increasingly influential view (which we refer to as “stakeholderism”) advocates giving corporate leaders increased discretionary power to serve all stakeholders and not just shareholders. Supporters of stakeholderism argue that its application would address growing concerns about the impact of corporations on society and the environment. By contrast, critics of stakeholderism argue that corporate leaders should not be expected to use expanded discretion to benefit stakeholders. This Article presents novel empirical evidence that can contribute to resolving this key debate. Following a stakeholderist framework, the constituency statutes adopted by more than thirty U.S. states authorize corporate leaders to give weight to stakeholder interests when considering a sale of their company. Using hand-collected data, we study how corporate leaders in fact used their stakeholderist discretion in transactions governed by such statutes in the past two decades. In particular, we provide a detailed analysis of more than 100 transactions governed by such statutes in which corporate leaders negotiated a company sale to a private equity buyer. We find that corporate leaders used their discretion to obtain gains for shareholders, executives, and directors. However, despite the clear risks that private equity acquisitions often posed for stakeholders, corporate leaders generally did not use their discretion to negotiate for any stake-holder protections. Indeed, in the small minority of cases in which some stakeholder protections were formally included, they were generally cosmetic and practically inconsequential. Beyond the implications of our findings for the long-standing debate on constituency statutes, these findings also provide important lessons for the ongoing debate on stakeholderism. At a minimum, stakeholderists should identify the causes for constituency statutes’ failure to deliver stakeholder benefits in the analyzed transactions and examine whether embracing stakeholderism would not similarly fail to produce such bene-fits. After examining alternative explanations for our findings, we conclude that the most plausible explanation lies in corporate leaders’ incen-tives not to protect stakeholders beyond what would serve shareholder value. Our findings thus indicate that stakeholderism cannot be relied on to produce its purported benefits for stakeholders. Stakeholderism there-fore should not be supported as an effective way for protecting stakeholder interests, even by those who deeply care about stakeholders. The document is based on presentations slides we prepared for various presentations of our study, including at Columbia Law School, Harvard Law School, the University of Chicago, and the 2021 Global Corporate Governance Colloquium. Our study For Whom Corporate Leaders Bargain is part of a larger research project of the Harvard Law School Corporate Governance on stakeholder capitalism. Another part of this research project is The Illusory Promise of Stakeholder Governance by Lucian A. Bebchuk and Roberto Tallarita.

Uber's Unintended Burdens

On August 13, 2020, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi explained that Uber is backing Proposition 22 that would exempt it from Assembly Bill 5 (AB5), a California law that would require Uber to treat its drivers as employees with benefits effectively on January 1, 2020.1 To win over California voters, Uber and Lyft were considering to shut down their services “temporarily” in California as a means to appeal to voters who vote on Proposition 22 in the November ballot. Given Uber lost over US$8 billion in 2019, and was expected to lose US$6 billion by October 2020, the AB5 law was expected to increase Uber’s operating cost dramatically. Also, it would be a major blow to Uber and other gig economy (e.g., Uber Eats, Grubhub, Deliveroo) if other states in the United States and other countries were to propose labor laws similar to AB5. In that case, Khosrowshahi’s premonition that Uber may never be profitable when it filed for IPO in 2019 would come true.2 Was this law to become the beginning of the end for Uber?

Prosecuting Attorneys in a Democracy – A California Perspective

A prosecuting attorney in a democracy is very important in the processing of criminal cases- from pre-filing to final appeal. Much of the involvement of the District Attorney, both before a criminal case is filed, and during the prosecution of the case, stems from the “Exclusionary Rule”. It is the usual case that the police will bring their investigation, their arrest warrant or search warrant affidavit to a District Attorney to review it prior to taking it to the judge. In this connection, District Attorneys will themselves reject 5-10% of the warrant requests submitted to them for approval, often asking law enforcement to do some further investigation before resubmitting the warrant. Furthermore, because of the Doctrine of Separation of Powers, only the District Attorney or the California State Attorney General can make the decision to file or not file a case. This Article illustrates the impact of such discretion. The problem of democracy is strictly connected to the process of DA’s selection, what has also been here presented. Another fundamental issue is a role of DA in voir dire, mainly because jury trials are guaranteed by the federal Constitution and are associated with the idea of democracy. Separation of Powers and Judicial Control of the DA, the police, and the sentencing of those convicted of crimes have been analyzed from the perspective of the California law. Additionally, the article includes final comments on the technological progress and its impact on criminal law and democracy. All the conclusions have been made in reference to Author’s experience as Assistant DA in California.

Shouting at each other into the void: A linguistic network analysis of vaccine hesitance and support in online discourse regarding California law SB277.

In 2015, California passed Senate Bill 277 and became the third state in the United States to ban all nonmedical exemptions from school immunization requirements, effectively prohibiting religious and personal belief exemptions. This attracted grassroots opposition and considerable debate among vaccine hesitant factions online. This mixed-methods study used quantitative linguistic analysis, semantic network analysis, and content analysis techniques to examine 2424 online documents drawn from newspapers, blogs, health websites, government information pages, web forums, personal websites, Facebook groups, among others. The study examined which words and phrases were used most frequently by vaccine skeptics, vaccine defenders, and more neutral media accounts to illuminate how groups with different attitudes towards vaccination discuss and disseminate information about vaccines and vaccine policy online. We proposed an innovative methodology for examining online discourse surrounding vaccine hesitance, as well as for studying the online dissemination of misinformation about vaccines. Our findings highlighted discrepancies in the narratives between what vaccine supporters believe causes vaccine skepticism and the issues that vaccine skeptics actually discuss within their own digital spaces. For example, in these exchanges, the importance of parental rights overshadowed that of children's rights; supporters of vaccines brought up autism in more distinct documents than skeptics do; distrust of government regulators and researchers seemed to unite vaccine skeptics and defenders; and politicians, doctors, and even celebrities often served as proxies in heated exchanges about factual evidence, believability, and the importance of expertise in public discourse.

Civilian Forensic Technician and Sworn Police Officer Job-Related Stress.

Forensic Technicians provide crime scene investigation services and are exposed to stressful violent crimes, motor vehicle accidents, biological or chemical hazards, and other appalling imagery. Forensic Technicians would likely experience physical and psychological stress after exposure to trauma, and security vulnerabilities similar to Sworn Police Officers. The perceived availability of mental health resources,job-related physical, psychological stress, and traumatic experiences of both Forensic Technicians and Sworn Police Officers from California law enforcement agencies were investigated using a self-reported survey. Responses were evaluated for any significant differences in the perceived stress, job-related physical stress, and resulting psychological impact affecting the participants. The survey contained a mix of True/False, Circle/Check the Appropriate Box, or Likert Scale (1-5) responses. The results were evaluated statistically and discussed. Results indicated Sworn Police Officers and Forensic Technicians have different on-duty stress levels, but similar off-duty stress levels. Nearly two-thirds of 54 job-related stressors were not significantly different between the two occupations. However, Forensic Technicians reported more adverse effects in 17 physical and psychological job-related activities compared with Sworn Police Officers. Forensic Technicians reported lower awareness levels and availability of agency mental health support services than were reported by Sworn Police Officers. This study reports for the first time an unexpected outcome that perceived and job-related psychological stress is greater for Forensic Technicians than Sworn Police Officers. Possible reasons for this disparity will be discussed as well as stress management tools that should be implemented to reduce health risk factors for both career professionals as well as increase public safety.

Audit of forced care in California fuels discussion of flaws in law

An audit examining implementation of California's law governing the provision of involuntary mental health treatment has found several flaws in the system of care for persons with serious mental illness. However, the audit itself is coming under some criticism as well, for not taking a deep enough dive into contributing issues such as inadequate state funding and outdated standards to determine the need for involuntary treatment.