Legal Question in Business Law in California

Re: California Business and Professions code Section 9790 - 9798.4

I have looked at the B&P Code sections on WestLaw, and note that there are no cases and very little other collateral material annotated to the Code. Looks as though there has been very little litigation on the topic.

However, my guess is that no state agency has what you call 'jurisdiction for enforcing' these code provisions. My first impression is that these provisions of law have to do with private rights as much as, or more, than they relate to defining a right or power of the state to regulate private conduct.

Hence, I don't think there is a statutory penalty. Rather, there is a private right to sue for actual damages that someone suffers as a result of another's breach of the statute.

Finally, if there is a record of administrative action, or any action at all, public or private, it is very scanty. As I say, WestLaw does not annotate any appellate decisions to any of the code sections.

This does not mean there is no case law; it just means that WestLaw apparently has found nothing to annotate. There are other sources such as Lexis-Nexis (I'm not a subscriber) that may have some case law or other authority such as law review articles or discussions in treatises.

Another possibility is that there are decisions in other states or based upon parallel Federal law that would be useful precedent in California.

Matters like this may belong in the hands of a law firm that can spend hundreds of junior associate hours poring over obscure sources than on a bulletin board where dozens of generalist attorneys spend 30 seconds wondering if they've ever heard of anything remotely relevant.