"Unpublished" Opinion Round-Up

Appellate courts issue opinions and orders to decide cases. The opinions and orders in many cases get "published," meaning that they end up in the bound reporters (the U.S., Federal, Federal Supplement, the official state reports, and in West's Regional Reports, for example) and become precedential and set forth a rule of law governing future litigation.

Most appellate courts also issue opinions and orders that are not "published" in the sense referred to above, even though they are "published" meaning they are made available to the public. Generally speaking, these are cases presenting more routine issues. Unpublished decisions may be designated as unpublished opinions, memorandum opinions, summary disposition orders, "per curiam" opinions, or simply may bear the notation "Not For Publication." The rules vary by jurisdiction on whether unpublished opinions are precedential, and even whether they can be cited in a brief. [Barista's note: we are of the school believing that nearly everything an appellate court does is important (even if it may not think so), and should be both available and citeable. The published vs unpublished distinction may have made sense when we were dealing with actual books and shelf space in the law library, but in the days of ubiquitous pdf's, we don't think this is such an issue.]

On this blog, we mostly focus on "published" opinions. That is a function both of the relative importance of published opinions vs unpublished, but also of the sheer volume of unpublished material produced by many courts. For example, compare the product of California's appellate courts: here are the published opinions from the last 100 hours, and here are the unpublished opinions from the same time frame. On most days, there's a huge difference in appellate court output, and we simply don't have the time to comb through the unpublished opinions looking for interesting items.  

So in the interest of equal time, we bring you a sampling of "unpublished" opinions for your reading pleasure. Are these cases interesting, controversial, and otherwise blogworthy?

• Karim v. City of Pomona, No. B210049 (Cal. Ct. App., May 18, 2010) (inverse condemnation, nuisance, damages, attorneys' fees).

• Avery v. County of Santa Clara, No. H033049 (Cal. Ct. App. May 18, 2010) (revocation of use permit, vested rights, regulatory takings).

• Palermo v. Town of North Reading, No. 09-1049 (5th Cir., Apr. 9, 2010) (takings, §1983)

• Howard v. County of San Diego, No. D055419 (Cal. Ct. App., Apr. 29, 2010) (inverse condemnation, denial of permit, exhaustion of administrative remedies).