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If you go to court seeking to have the terms of a trust enforced, you’d better understand what the trust really says.

A line in “Two Tickets to Paradise,” one of singer Eddie Money’s best-known songs, is “Won’t you pack your bags.” In 2015 that was what the rocker told his longtime drummer Glenn Symmonds, firing him and others in his band. Was Symmonds the victim of age discrimination, or was Money exercising his rights, protected by the First Amendment, to decide who would perform with him?

Imagine that you let your neighbor occasionally take a shortcut across your property to get to a nearby state park. Then, sometime later, you realize that your neighbor’s Airbnb tenants are stomping along that pathway every week – and you can’t stop them.

A gift from one sister to another triggered a hike in property taxes that made what may have been intended as a kind gesture into an unexpectedly expensive transaction.

In California’s robust tech and start-up sector, companies often lure top talent with stock options which, if the company is successful, may eventually be worth millions. But how should a court value those options when calculating a parent’s child support obligations?

“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but legal ambiguity is not,” declared the California Court of Appeal, embellishing with that literary flourish a fairly routine dispute over an easement – but one with an important lesson for property owners.