(Subscription required) A California appellate court reversed a $41 million judgment against Suzuki Motor Corp. in a defective motorcycle brake case, ordering a new trial on liability and compensatory damages while barring any retrial on punitive damages.

A defendant who was convicted of exchanging sexually explicit electronic messages with someone he thought was a 13-year-old girl—but was actually a vice detective—was wrongfully put to the choice of waiving his entrapment defense or having his conviction of a sex offense 50 years earlier brought up, Div. Three of the Fourth District Court of Appeal held yesterday.

Div. Three of the Fourth District Court of Appeal has reversed an order denying an anti-SLAPP motion brought by Orange County in response to a suit by a private company that runs a housing project and is seeking a declaration that it is immune from taxes on the ground that an exempt local joint-powers authority, with which it works, owns the real property.

Div. Four of the First District Court of Appeal has imposed a $10,000 sanction on a self-represented party who the panel describes as a “persistent litigant” who engages in “tossing] around ad hominem attacks on…everyone who disagrees with him” and pursued frivolous arguments that bore “Alice in Wonderland” qualities in mounting collateral attacks on final judgments and making other objectively baseless claims.