I looked that case up. What happened was that, back in 1970 when the law was written, the California legislature, in its wisdom, inserted a typographic error in this law which changed “vertrebrae” to “invertebrae”. So every case ruling on this law requires that the judges write flaming nonsense to avoid ruling that the law is useless because the legislature screwed up.
Yeah, but a judge should have kicked it back to the legislature years ago. This garbage of having a court do legal gymnastics worthy of John Roberts every couple of years is wasteful.
But, it’s California, what can we expect?