Mandel v. Myers

In Mandel v. Myers (1981) 29 Cal.3d 531, the expenditure at issue was a payment to satisfy final judgment awarding attorney fees against various state agencies and officers. After the state did not voluntarily comply with the judgment, the trial court ordered the State Controller to pay the award out of the funds appropriated in the 1978-79 Budget Act for the operating expenses of the Department of Health Services, the principal defendant in the underlying case. The Supreme Court rejected the Attorney General's argument that the trial court's order violated constitutional separation of powers principles. The court looked to the terms of the Budget Act itself, and to past administrative practice, and concluded that the general operating expense appropriation was a category broad enough to encompass court-awarded attorney fees. The court recognized that the Legislature intended to deny payment of this award: a legislative committee had deleted from the act an express line-item appropriation for the fee, and the act itself provided that no appropriation made therein was to be used to achieve any purpose which had been denied by any formal action of the Legislature. Nevertheless, the question was whether such an exclusion of a particular award from the general appropriation provided in the agency operating expense budget was valid. The exclusion was unlawful, the court concluded, because it amounted to a legislative readjudication of the merits of a final court judgment, an impermissible usurpation of traditional judicial authority. ( Mandel, supra , 29 Cal.3d at p. 552.)