Anna-Rose Mathieson

Californians will for the foreseeable future enjoy broad access rights to the state’s beautiful coastline thanks in large part to the work of Anna-Rose Mathieson, one of the West Coast’s leading appellate litigators.

In 2018, a state law protecting those rights was the subject of a serious challenge brought by Silicon Valley billionaire Vinod Khosla, who had fought a full-fledged legal battle to block a portion of San Mateo County coastline called Martins Beach.

With deep pockets, Khosla brought in a top tier appellate advocate, former U.S. Solicitor General Paul Clement, to get the California and U.S. Supreme Courts to reverse a state appellate decision blocking Khosla from privatizing the stretch of shoreline. Surfrider Foundation v. Martins Beach 1 LLC, 14 Cal. App. 5th 238 (2017).

“As anticipated, Paul wrote a strong cert petition, got four amici groups to support him,” Mathieson said, recounting the case. “The court called for a response on the very first day after the petition was circulated. That’s a very quick time to have a call for response. It was a sign that certainly one of the justices was taking the case seriously.”

That’s when Mathieson’s experience as a former high court clerk to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg came into play. She focused briefing on an argument that the procedural posture of the case was not appropriate for Supreme Court review, noting California was not a party to the litigation and Khosla had never actually applied for a permit before testing the state’s law.

“No clerk wants to be recommending a case taken and later granted as improvidently granted,” she said.

In October, the justices announced they would not hear the case, leaving the California appeals court decision intact.

Mathieson also won an interesting appeal advancing an old, and until recently somewhat forgotten, defense of disentitlement for a client who successfully sued hot Bikram Yoga founder Bikram Choudhury for pervasive sexual harassment in his organization and retaliation after he fired her for reporting the behavior.

The co-chair of the California Appellate Law Group argued that, Choudhury who had fled the country after the verdict, could not simultaneously ask for appellate reversal while refusing to appear before the trial court below on numerous occasions.

“Even though he’d filed merits briefing, we won dismissal of his appeal without having to go to oral arguments, which was particularly good, given that he had presented a jurisdictional challenge,” Mathieson said.

— Nicolas Sonnenburg