The Court of Appeal's opinion in People ex rel. City of Santa Monica v. Gabriel, ___ Cal.App.4th ___ (Jul. 14, 2010) (Second Appellate District, Division One) has two holdings of note.
First, sexual harassment of a residential tenant by her landlord constitutes a "business act or practice" remediable under the UCL. Slip op. at 5-6. Landlord-tenant sexual harassment violates several statutes and municipal ordinances, and the city attorney brought the case as a UCL "unlawful" prong claim. See id. at 2. (Of course, the city attorney need not worry about Prop. 64 standing or whether anyone "lost money or property" as a result of the defendant's conduct. See Bus. & Prof. Code § 17204.)
Second, attorneys' fees are not recoverable under the UCL, even if the "borrowed" law has a fee-shifting provision. Slip op. at 7-10. The Court of Appeal reached a similar conclusion last November in Davis v. Ford Motor Credit Co., 179 Cal.App.4th 581 (2009), affirming denial of a prevailing defendant's attorneys' fees motion in an "unlawful" prong case in which the "borrowed" law would have permitted fee-shifting if the action had been brought directly under that law. Id. at 599-601. The Gabriel opinion does not mention Davis.
See this blog post for a discussion of the attorneys' fees holding in Davis.
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