Yesterday, the Supreme Court heard oral argument in Brinker Restaurant Corp. v. Superior Court (Hohnbaum), no. S166350. I had the privilege of presenting the argument on behalf of the workers along with my co-counsel Michael Rubin.
The argument focused primarily on the substantive Labor Code issues. There was comparatively little argument or questioning on the class certification issues. Of the few questions asked during my brief rebuttal, none related to class certification.
Matt Bailey has an interesting summary of the argument at his blog, the Bailey Class Action Daily. Unfortunately it turns out that the live web feed had some technical glitches.
The complete video of the argument is available on YouTube at this link. It should also soon be available at the California Channel website, but it isn't up yet.
There has been quite a bit of press coverage as well. According to Laura Ernde's article in this morning's Daily Journal (link not available), the justices were "skeptical" of the idea that meal periods should be mandatory in the sense that workers can never choose to work through them, but seemed to accept the idea that employees cannot be required to work more than five hours at a time without a meal period. The article does not address any of the class certification issues.
The opinion will be due in 90 days, which is going to be no later than early February.
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