California Appellate Justices

Appellate courts speak through majority opinions, which must express the view of the panel. A separately written dissent speaks for its author alone. In my experience, that is why dissents are often where a justice explains his or her own reasoning most directly — the treatment of precedent, the reading of a statute, the weight given to procedure.

There is also a practical reason these pages exist. A brief has to be written before the panel is set, so there is no way to write toward the three justices who will actually decide the case. By the time of oral argument, the panel is public, and reviewing what the assigned justices have said when they disagreed with a majority is one useful way to anticipate what a particular bench is likely to press on.

These pages collect opinions in which each justice dissented, with a short neutral note on what the majority held, and link to the full opinions so that readers can draw their own conclusions. A dissent is not controlling authority regardless of whether the underlying opinion was published, and nothing here predicts how any justice will decide a future case.

A small number of the opinions linked below are unpublished, meaning the Court of Appeal did not certify them for publication in the Official Reports; California Rule of Court 8.1115 does not permit an unpublished opinion to be cited or relied on by a court or a party in any other action, and these pages do not suggest otherwise. An unpublished dissent is included here for the same reason a published one is: it shows how the dissenting justice reasoned on a real case, which can be useful in spotting a pattern even where it carries no legal weight. Every unpublished opinion on these pages is marked as such next to the case name.

Some judges rarely write separately; where no dissenting opinion has been identified for a judge, these pages say so rather than imply that one exists.

Thomas Ogden, Esq.
Certified Specialist in Appellate Law
State Bar of California Board of Legal Specialization