Dupree

I. INTRODUCTION

Before daily life in this country froze on November 22, 1963 at 1:38 p.m. Central Time when the tragic news from Dallas came across the airwaves—or perhaps later that day, which would confirm that our courts always remain open, even in times of crisis—a minor event of little note occurred here in California: A First District Court of Appeal, Division One panel filed its opinion in Oliver v. Swiss Club Tell (1963) 222 Cal.App.2d 528 (Oliver). Nearly 60 years later, the events in Dealey Plaza on the day Oliver was filed continue to reverberate through history. This case shows that Oliver, too, is still having ripple effects, here in an obscure corner of California civil procedure. Oliver was, in many respects, a routine summary judgment appeal. But it arose in an odd posture because there was evidence in the record that

1 the only defendant that was a party to the appeal, an unincorporated association, had been merged out of existence in 1934, more than two decades before the case was filed in 1958. That raised a novel, largely evidentiary question: Did statements in an answer filed on behalf of an apparently nonexistent entity operate as a binding admission of the…