(800) 566-4868 Client Login

Home · Resources

Law Updates

Plain-English summaries of published court decisions we think California workers should know about. These are not WRA Law case results—for the firm’s verdicts, settlements, and appellate work, see Case Results.

Summaries are for general education only—not legal advice—and do not capture every nuance in the underlying opinions.

Flowers Foods, Inc. v. Brock — U.S. Supreme Court opinion (PDF) (2026)

A unanimous U.S. Supreme Court decision (Justice Gorsuch) about when workers can stay out of forced private arbitration and bring wage and employment claims in court instead. Angelo Brock is a Flowers Foods distributor in the Denver area: he picks up packaged baked goods from a Colorado warehouse and delivers them to local stores—never leaving the state. He sued Flowers alleging underpayment under federal and state law. Flowers pointed to an arbitration clause in his distribution agreement and asked the court to send the case to arbitration under the Federal Arbitration Act (FAA).

Congress carved out an important exception. FAA §1 says “nothing” in the statute may be used to compel arbitration in disputes over the contracts of employment of certain transportation workers—including any class of workers “engaged in … interstate commerce.” Flowers argued Brock could never qualify unless he personally crossed state lines. The Supreme Court affirmed the Tenth Circuit: a worker who moves goods on an intrastate leg of a longer interstate shipment can still count, even if he never crosses a border. The Court built on Saxon (2022) and Bissonnette (2024) for bakery-route workers. It left open whether a distributor running his own LLC has a “contract of employment” for §1 purposes.

Related: Wage & Hour · Misclassification

Husband v. Target Corporation — published opinion (PDF) (2026)

A California Court of Appeal decision about FEHA and mental disability. A Target employee had bipolar I disorder but did not tell any Target “official.” After two incidents of upsetting behavior, Target fired him under its workplace-violence policy. He sued for disability discrimination, failure to accommodate, and failure to engage in the interactive process. The trial court granted summary judgment for Target, and the Court of Appeal affirmed.

In plain English: the employer ordinarily must know you have a disabling condition before disability duties attach. Where you have not disclosed a diagnosis, courts ask whether a disability is the only fair reading of what the employer observed. Here, erratic behavior alone was not enough—stress, exhaustion, substances, and other causes could explain it. The opinion notes employees who need accommodations can disclose when medically appropriate; FEHA forbids retaliation for that disclosure.

Related: Disability Discrimination · Disability Accommodation · Interactive Process