4DCA Division 2 Oral Argument 2025/12/2 Afternoon Session - Dec 02, 2025

argument

4DCA Division 2 Oral Argument 2025/12/2 Afternoon Session

California Fourth District Court of Appeal, Division Two 1h 55m 8 chapters transcribed 7 days ago official recording ↗

▲ 0

Transcript

jump: chapters · find in transcript

Transcript

Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.

What does the judge say when opening the afternoon oral‑argument session?

Betty 11:15

All right.

Justice McKinster 11:18

Thank you. Uh thank you, ladies and gentlemen. Please be seated. And uh to all, uh good afternoon and welcome to the Court of Appeal, both those who are in the courtroom and those who uh might be appearing on Zoom online. Uh this is the first of three panels, strike that two panels that will uh appear this afternoon. Uh this panel is uh constituted to hear the first three cases on calendar. We'll take a brief recess. and then reconstitute the panel for uh the final uh uh case because we need a a different uh justice on that panel. With that in mind, I'm just gonna go ahead and start with our first case it's Seaboard uh versus John Clutier.

John Clutier 12:09

Uh good afternoon, uh John Flutier for for myself.

Justice McKinster 12:13

All right, m uh Mr. Plutier. And uh for Seaboard are you appearing remotely?

Jeff Lewis 12:19

Yes, Your Honor, Jeff Lewis for Seaboard, thank you for allowing me to appear remotely.

Justice McKinster 12:23

Oh absolutely, Mr. Lewis. And your name is spelled correctly uh in the uh captioning of the tentative opinion, is that correct?

Jeff Lewis 12:32

Yes, Your Honor.

Justice McKinster 12:33

All right. And Mr. Claudier, I might pronounce your name correctly. I'm giving it the French pronunciation, but I sometimes it's not right.

John Clutier 12:41

Depends where you are in the country, you are it's pronounced different ways, different places, but uh I pronounce it the way you do.

Justice McKinster 12:47

You do, Cludier, the French way. Okay. Uh with that in mind, uh we you do have Mr. Cludier uh fifteen minutes of uh t total time. Uh you get to open and close, uh but your close comes out of that fifteen minutes. Did you wish to reserve some part of that time in order to respond to Mr. Lewis?

John Clutier 13:07

Yes, I'd like to uh reserve five minutes to respond.

Justice McKinster 13:10

All right. Our our clerk Betty is going to give you uh Oh. Yeah, that's all right. Our clerk will give you a five minute warning. If you'll notice on the podium we have three lights green, uh yellow and red. Your fifteen minutes starts when the uh green light comes on, two minutes when you have uh uh two minutes when the yellow light comes on, and red is when you're absolutely out of time. That also appears for those uh people on the screen who are appearing uh uh online. And I neglected uh to introduce the panel. Uh on my right is uh Justice uh Fields. Good afternoon. And on my left, just as uh Rafael. Good afternoon. And my name is uh Justice McKinster. And with all that in mind, whenever you're ready, uh Mr Cliffier will uh hear your argument.

John Clutier 14:05

Hey, all right, uh thank you, Your Honor. Um this uh I purchased this property with two partners back in uh nineteen eighty-three. Uh in 2019, Seaboard bought my two partners two-thirds interest, and they immediately tried to get me to sell my share to them for basically nothing. Um and I would not do that. I knew the value of the the property. Uh they filed a partition action as a continuation of that uh strategy. Uh they had been making false claims like that the property was vacant in horrible shape and so forth. Uh they filed this case. I was not secured properly, uh served properly. Uh eventually did come into the case. Uh the default against me was vacated. They uh I did not object to the petition sale.

John Clutier 14:59

Um and an interlocutory order of uh was entered uh setting the shares, two-thirds theirs, one-third mine, uh ordering a petition and ordering the manner of petition. Uh There were some other things in the order that are well under uh nine oh four one A nine, I believe it is, uh To make the property marketable, that those first three items are um immediately appealable. So if you don't want to if you want to object to the petition with a manner of sale or something, you have to object then. Other parts of the uh order are not uh do not affect marketability and are not immediately appealable. And we'll get into that. Um so the property was uh put up with the referee. property was sold and a claims period uh was entered.

John Clutier 15:54

Um uh Seaboard made claims of over eighty being owed over eighty thousand dollars and most of the claims were patently uh fraudulent. They claimed to have put a new roof on, there was no new roof. They claimed to have put uh new cabinets in and they were the same cabinets as in nineteen eighty three when I bought 'em and probably from nineteen