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What happens when members of a partnership make careful plans for what will happen when one of the partners dies – but later, when one of them does pass away, they don’t like the outcome? A likely result is that the matter will end up in court, and one such case was recently the subject of a ruling by the California Court of Appeal (Han v. Hallberg.)

Should a truck driver be expected to understand that, by applying for a job in San Francisco, he agreed to give up protections provided by the California Labor Code and to settle any disputes with his employer through arbitration conducted under New York law?

A line in “Two Tickets to Paradise,” one of singer Eddie Money’s best-known songs, is “Won’t you pack your bags.” In 2015 that was what the rocker told his longtime drummer Glenn Symmonds, firing him and others in his band. Was Symmonds the victim of age discrimination, or was Money exercising his rights, protected by the First Amendment, to decide who would perform with him?

Imagine that you let your neighbor occasionally take a shortcut across your property to get to a nearby state park. Then, sometime later, you realize that your neighbor’s Airbnb tenants are stomping along that pathway every week – and you can’t stop them.

A gift from one sister to another triggered a hike in property taxes that made what may have been intended as a kind gesture into an unexpectedly expensive transaction.

“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but legal ambiguity is not,” declared the California Court of Appeal, embellishing with that literary flourish a fairly routine dispute over an easement – but one with an important lesson for property owners.