In 1971, UC Davis became the first university in the country to add a fermentation science major to its undergraduate course catalog. However, even though — nearly five decades later — California is nearing 1,000 craft breweries, and despite the legal and regulatory morass that awaits every new brewery owner, Dan Croxall believes that earlier this year, he conducted the first-ever craft beer law class at an American law school.

A California initiative to allow more rent control appears to be failing overwhelmingly, despite the state’s exploding housing costs and ever-rising rents, and its sponsors are already talking about trying again in 2020.

Another day, another poll in California.

While an employee can always file a claim in court, a signed mandatory arbitration clause means that either party can make a motion to the judge to compel arbitration in lieu of proceeding with the court action.

One month from the Illinois primary, GOP Congressman John Porter decided something needed to be done about an upstart candidate named John Cox.

A 1994 blockbuster among the MBA set, the book is a series of case studies on how some of the world’s leading corporations made it big. And it says a lot about the 51-year-old Democrat who polls say is most likely to become California’s next governor.

For the last several years, the majority of politicians elected statewide have been northern Californians—including the governor, lieutenant governor, schools superintendent and both U.S. senators. That could change after November’s election.

Insurance commissioner candidate Steve Poizner is shunning partisanship in his bid to become the first no-party-preference candidate to win statewide office in California. But to pay for his campaign, the former Republican has turned to people he knows best when it comes to raising money: Republicans.

In any campaign, big money players get the most attention. But Democrats running in California’s seven most competitive congressional districts are vastly outraising Republicans in small-dollar donations, according to a review of campaign money compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics.

The DMV gave the public a series of piecemeal explanations as it acknowledged making more than 100,000 errors in recent months in registering Californians to vote. Software problems, it said in May. Human errors from toggling between computer windows, it said in September. Data entry mistakes that were corrected but never saved, it said this month.

The officials gathered at the front of the room, arranging themselves on a dais, last fall at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Bonn, Germany.

A Florida-based company accused of botching the clean-up after last year’s devastating fires in Santa Rosa has jumped into California politics, writing big checks to Gavin Newsom’s gubernatorial campaign and the California Democratic Party.

Dutchman’s Stroopwafels may be the first business to cook on a bicycle in Sacramento, but local entrepreneurs have been finding creative ways to combine the area’s twin passions for cuisine and cycles for decades.

Californians in November will weigh billions of dollars’ worth of ballot measures for low-income housing, children’s hospitals and more. But one of the biggest asks will be mostly invisible to most voters—100 or more local proposals to sell bonds for school construction projects that, if passed, could total more than $12 billion in local borrowing in coming years.

Uncertainty over where people can consume marijuana can create significant limitations for cannabis businesses. 

As California lawmakers struggled this week to address an apparent new normal of epic wildfires, there was an inescapable subtext: Climate change is going to be staggeringly expensive, and virtually every Californian is going to have to pay for it.

State and federal labor laws give employees a wide range of worker protections, from overtime pay and minimum wages to the right to unionize. But those rights don’t extend to independent contractors, whose ranks have grown dramatically in the gig economy.

Jennifer Randlett Madden, partner at Delfino Madden O’Malley Coyle & Koewler, offers her insight into independent contractor classification. For more from Madden, check out “Classification Complications” in our August issue, and now online.

Employee classification is already murky territory for many business owners, and recent changes have further tightened requirements. Yet, with huge penalties attached to mistakes, the laws are critical to understand.

Sacramento’s effort to expand mobile food codes is part of a statewide push to legitimize California’s long tradition of sidewalk vending.