Court Opinion

ID: 9751244
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-28 16:16:17.479989+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:26:40.705037
License: Public Domain

JOHNSON, Acting P. J., Concurring.
I concur in the judgment and write separately for the sole purpose of urging the Legislature to provide an effective means capable of enforcing the provisions it enacted which purport to require financial institutions to protect the privacy interests of consumers. Although many or most such institutions may elect to voluntarily abide by Code of Civil Procedure section 1985.3, after this opinion they will feel no compulsion to do so. The parties and their lawyers involved in the litigation itself are subject to various unpleasant consequences—such as monetary or evidentiary sanctions—for unlawful behavior in the litigation context. But financial institutions which violate section 1985.3 face no such possibilities.
As there is “no right without a remedy,”1 there is no legal duty without a sanction for ignoring that duty. Otherwise the duty is only a moral duty, the violator of which risks nothing but a guilty conscience. Thus, I urge the Legislature to create—or recreate—the sanction and thus the remedy for this important aspect of the right to privacy in California.
*644The sanction the Legislature devises might take the form of a new section expressly authorizing those harmed by violations of this statutory protection to file lawsuits, along the lines of real parties in interest’s damage action in this case. There may be other options, too. But unless the Legislature creates some effective enforcement mechanism, one that operates within the litigation environment and despite the expansive litigation privilege the courts have carved out in the past two decades, Code of Civil Procedure section 1985.3 is nothing more than precatory—an aspiration not a protection for consumers whose constitutional rights to privacy are at stake.
The petition of real parties in interest for review by the Supreme Court was denied December 19, 2007, S157643.

 Peck v. Jenness (1849) 48 U.S. 612, 623 [12 L.Ed. 841] (“A legal right without a remedy would be an anomaly in the law.”); Barquis v. Merchants Collection Assn. (1972) 7 Cal.3d 94, 112 [101 Cal.Rptr. 745, 496 P.2d 817] (“There is a maxim as old as law that there can be no right without a remedy ....”); American Philatelic Soc. v. Claibourne (1935) 3 Cal.2d 689, 699 [46 P.2d 135] (same); Nougues v. Douglass (1857) 7 Cal. 65, 80 (“It is a rule as old as the law itself, that there is no right without a remedy, and wrong without a redress . . . .”).