Top Lawyers on Civil Code § 3334 "benefits obtained" damages and trespass actions
William and Julie Ann Sarale were perturbed when PG&E suddenly began hacking down their walnut trees. PG&E had operated power lines on the grove since 1915 and never did more than keep a 10-foot clearance neatly trimmed from the trees. But in 2004, PG&E started removing whole walnut-rich branches, declaring it now needs a 20-foot […]
The previous article in this series discussed how California cases treated trespass claims seeking ]disgorgement and restitution before the legislature enacted Civil Code § 3334 in 1992. To recap: There was the 1960 “dirt case” of Don v. Trogan Construction, where the court awarded “fair rental value” against trespassers, even though the vacant lot had […]
Associate Dean Donald J. Kochan at Chapman University Fowler School of Law has a new article up titled Playing with Real Property Inside Augmented Reality: Pokemon Go, Trespass, and Law’s Limitations. The article is available at SSRN. A taste: This symposium essay uses the popular game Pokémon Go as a case study for evaluating conflicts […]
—Do you have a pipeline running through your property? —What about a power line? Or water line? —Maybe a neighboring business is encroaching your property line? Or its customers are parking on your property? These and many other forms of trespass might also fall under California’s restitutionary statute Civil Code § 3334, which disgorges trespassers […]
Residents and business owners near the lovely La Jolla Cove were disappointed to receive the Court of Appeal’s decision this month in Citizens for Odor Nuisance Abatement v. City of San Diego, 2017 WL 526503, holding the city was not responsible in public-nuisance theory for the surge in the local sea-lion population, and all their offensive, […]
By Tim Kowal The makers of the app Pokemon Go earned a staggering 500 million downloads in 2016 by making certain landowners’ property part of its popular “pocket monster” game. A collaboration between game giant Nintendo and newcomer Niantic, this boundaries-no-object global scavenger hunt is estimated to have earned just under a billion dollars in […]