Court Rejects UCLA Appeal on Japanese Garden

As readers of this blog will know, UCLA has been trying to sell its Hannah Carter Japanese Garden since shortly after the death of Hannah Carter, despite its earlier promise to maintain the Garden “in perpetuity.” The sale was not conditioned on the buyer maintaining the Garden. Her family obtained an injunction blocking the sale. Now UCLA’s appeal of that injunction has been rejected and the court case will go to trial unless UCLA reaches some kind of accommodation with the plaintiffs that would protect the Garden. Various garden conservation groups have taken up the cause. It appears that if the university had not secretly gone to an Oakland court to get permission to hold the sale and had worked with the family and conservation groups, this litigation could have been avoided. But that has not been UCLA’s approach in this matter. The standard applied by the appeals court and the lower court regarding the continued injunction is that the plaintiffs had a reasonable probability of prevailing. A front-page story about the decision appears in the Beverly Hills Courier which can be downloaded at http://bhcourier.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/091313Fissue.pdf.

UPDATE: The Daily Bruin version is at http://dailybruin.com/2013/09/14/halt-on-sale-of-hannah-carter-japanese-garden-upheld/

You can read the court decision at the link below: