by Andy Chen | Apr 13, 2020 | California, Law, in real life
In this post, I’m going to go over a law that, as best I can tell, is unique to California. If I’m wrong and you have a similar law in your state or country, drop me a comment. The California law in questions is section 17602 of the California Business and Professions Code. As it is a California law, it only applies to California consumers. However, if I run a business and have to invest (e.g. buy new software, etc) to comply with section 17602 for my California-based customers, I see no reason not to apply section 17602 to my customers who aren’t in California also (as long, of course, as it benefits my business in some way). My marginal cost of doing so is basically zero. Section 17602 applies to transactions where consumers purchase a subscription to something, such as a magazine or a monthly-box service (e.g. each month you receive a new box of a certain category of item, such as men’s clothing, pet treats, etc). These subscriptions often are recurring on a monthly or year basis. The consumer — at least in theory — has the option to cancel their subscription at the end of each monthly or yearly-term. How it often works out, though, is that the consumer ends up being charged for things they weren’t expecting. This might be the consumer’s fault because they, for instance, forgot to cancel their subscription in a timely manner and ended up getting charged for another year. Or it could be because the company is unscrupulous and decided to ignore the consumer’s timely request to cancel their subscription....
by Andy Chen | Apr 11, 2020 | California, Constitutional Law, Criminal law
In this post, I’m going to go over a situation that I’m sure we’ve all seen. I’m not sure how often it occurs in reality, but when it does occur, it always seems to go viral. Can you take a photograph or video of law enforcement when they’re making an arrest or detaining someone for an investigation? A lot of the videos I’ve seen before where, for example, someone tries to record law enforcement officers making an arrest involve one or more of the officers threatening or informing the person to put their camera away because making a recording “interferes” or “obstructs” the officers in some way. Three thoughts come to my mind in response to a statement like that: There are enough cameras nowadays everywhere that we’re all being videotaped and photographed in some way every day. This doesn’t even consider the stuff that people voluntarily share on social media. It’s implausible for anyone to expect that anything they do out in the open on a public street is private or confidential in anyway. If you want privacy, confidentiality, etc, you’re not going to find it on a public street. Government is supposed to be transparent as well which means that any government employee (e.g. law enforcement officers) should expect that the public would be interested in what they do. For all of these reasons, I personally don’t buy in to the argument that merely recording or photographing law enforcement officers detaining someone, arresting someone, etc is obstruction, interference, or is in some way improper. If you feel similarly and you’re in California, you’re in luck because California...
by Andy Chen | Apr 6, 2020 | California, Torts
Nowadays, it is quite common for individuals to take photographs and/or videos of a sexual nature and share them with their current relationship partner. Unfortunately, sometimes the relationship ends in an acrimonious way and the recipient of said photographs and/or videos decides — who might feel wronged or slighted — decides to share them with others as a way of getting even. The term “Revenge Porn” is often used to describe this situation. In California, perpetrators of Revenge Porn (i.e. those who share sexual photos and videos of others) can be punished in a variety of ways. For example, there’s criminal prosecution under California Penal Code section 647(j)(4), which I will cover in a later post. One key thing I’ll point out now, though, is that if the victim in a Revenge Porn case is a minor (e.g. 16 or 17 years old), additional charges related to, for instance, child pornography may be on the table also. Many criminal sentences (e.g. jail time) are also increased for Revenge Porn cases involving a victim who is a minor. In this post, I’ll briefly go over the civil suit liability under California Civil Code section 1708.85(a), which provides: “A private cause of action lies against a person who intentionally distributes by any means a photograph, film, videotape, recording, or any other reproduction of another, without the other’s consent, if (1) the person knew that the other person had a reasonable expectation that the material would remain private, (2) the distributed material exposes an intimate body part of the other person, or shows the other person engaging in an act of intercourse,...
by Andy Chen | Mar 31, 2020 | California
Here is a video I have on my Youtube channel where I go over guarantees a lawyer might make a client make ask for when it comes to the outcome of a case. In short, I argue that it’s not realistic for a client to ask their lawyer for a guaranteed outcome (e.g. the client will win at trial, etc). The reason is because that outcome will depend on many factors that are outside of the lawyer’s control. At a minimum, it will depend, for instance, on what evidence the opposing party or parties have, what witnesses will testify to, and the habits and idiosyncrasies of the judge and jury. In my experience, many clients don’t understand this and think incorrectly that they should hire a lawyer who gives a guarantee over a lawyer who does not. If you are in a position where a prospective attorney is offering you such a guarantee, it may be prudent to stop and ask yourself whether this attorney is just offering you the guarantee in order to get your business and your money. In this blog post, I’m going to add on to my video above by citing to some authority, specifically the California Rules of Professional Conduct (CPRC). I have a video on my Youtube channel about the CPRC also which I’ll embed below. That video is a bit old so it uses the old CPRC numbering scheme of a number, a dash, and additional numbers (e.g. Rule 3-100). The current CPRC scheme dispenses with the dashes in favor of decimal points (e.g. Rule 1.5). If any of you need it,...
by Andy Chen | Mar 10, 2020 | New York, Torts
A while back, I wrote a post about what civil battery under California law. This post is going to be the comparable post for New York law. Law school in the US is somewhat generic in that you learn what a given offense (e.g. civil battery) is in the abstract, even though the actual criteria for the offense in the real world will dependent on the state. When I learned about civil battery, for example, I learned it as “a harmful or offense touching either done with subjective desire or knowledge to a substantial certainty”. If you’re thinking that that rolls off the tongue, you’re correct. When you actually want to sue someone for civil battery in the real world, however, you need more specific criteria than that. In California — as I described in my previous post linked above — the criteria for civil battery can be found in the So v. Shin case (cite: So v. Shin (2013) 212 Cal.Appl.4th 652, 669) as: defendant touched plaintiff, or caused plaintiff to be touched with the intent to harm or offend plaintiff, plaintiff did not consent to the touching, plaintiff was harmed or offended by defendant’s conduct, and a reasonable person in plaintiff’s position would have been offended by the touching. Under New York law, the comparable criteria for civil battery are: defendant intentionally made bodily contact against the plaintiff, that this contact was harmful or offensive to the plaintiff, that plaintiff did not consent to the contact, and These criteria are recited in a number of New York state cases including (1) Wende C. v. United Methodist Church...
