Louie H. Castoria

SAN FRANCISCO - Louie H. Castoria has been defending insurance and real estate brokers, accountants, lawyers and other professionals from liability claims for four decades. Yet he recently won a pair of appeals raising constitutional issues.

He is now the chair emeritus of his law firm's professional liability practice group. But he is the leader of its new 38-lawyer appellate team, which he founded in January 2021.

His most recent constitutional appellate victory came this summer when the 9th Circuit ruled that California does not violate ex-felons' due process and equal protection rights by prohibiting them from becoming emergency medical technicians. Gurrola v. Duncan, 21- 15414 (9th Cir., June 9, 2022).

Eleven months earlier, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that nonprofits don't have to disclose their major donors to the California Department of Justice. Thomas More Law Center v. Bonta, 141 S. Ct. 2373 (2021).

"You wouldn't expect those to be insurance defense cases, but they were," Castoria said. In the firefighter case, he represented an insured doctor who headed a Northern California EMT program. The Thomas More Center's insurer treated the California attorney general's written demand for the donor list as equivalent to a subpoena, which it covered.

He said the high court's decision in Thomas More was right in line with a unanimous precedent from 1958 that protected the NAACP membership list from the state of Alabama. Thanks to the court's new decision, "every 501(c)(3) corporation in the U.S. has the same freedom now that they do in California," he said. "Which is kinda' cool."

He also dedicates as much time as he can to teaching nonlawyers in the field about law and legal terms. He also teaches a pair of trial-practice courses at Golden Gate University School of Law, including an unusual one he calls Overcoming Civil Litigation Obstacles.

And, as he has for 25 years, he writes a weekly humor column for the Half Moon Bay Review, his hometown newspaper.