Johnson v. Ford Motor Co.

*1214 CHIN, J.,

Concurring.—I agree fully with the majority opinion that I have signed. I write separately only to emphasize my understanding that the Court of Appeal is not precluded from reaching the same result on remand after reconsidering all relevant factors if it believes that result is correct under the law as explained in today’s opinion.

As the majority opinion states, the Court of Appeal found that “ ‘defendant’s entire customer response program was structured precisely to short-circuit lemon law claims whenever defendant plausibly could,’ by restrictively interpreting state lemon laws and ignoring the possibility of nonpresumptive lemons.” (Maj. opn., ante, at p. 1200, italics added.) Defendant was content with the result in the Court of Appeal, so it did not petition for review on this point, and the majority properly expresses no opinion regarding it. (Maj. opn., ante, at p. 1212, fn. 13.) It is not clear to me that defendant’s overall behavior was as reprehensible as the Court of Appeal suggests. As might be expected, defendant has taken a very narrow view of what qualifies as a “lemon.” It has also attempted to avoid laws requiring notification of defects to future buyers. But there is a difference between avoiding a law by a narrow interpretation and evading a law by ignoring or knowingly violating it.

To the extent defendant was merely trying to get around the lemon laws whenever it “plausibly” could, I am not sure its conduct was reprehensible at all. Trying to evade the lemon laws illegally would be reprehensible. But trying to avoid the lemon laws by a narrow, but plausible, interpretation does not seem reprehensible, at least until a court rules against that narrow interpretation. I see nothing in today’s opinion that precludes the Court of Appeal from reconsidering all relevant factors in determining the maximum permissible constitutional award.