A demurrer guts your case, and the only claim that survives isn't worth a trial. What do you do? For two decades, California lawyers answered this problem by voluntarily dismissing what was left and appealing from the dismissal. The Supreme Court closed that door in Maniago v. Desert Cardiology Consultants' Medical Group (Cal. July 16, 2026, No. S290188).
Glenn Maniago worked as a surgical technologist. During a cardiac procedure, a physician discarded a syringe of HIV-positive blood into Maniago's eyes instead of the safety bucket. He and his wife sued on several theories. The trial court sustained a demurrer to most of them with leave to amend, struck punitive damages, fees, and prejudgment interest, and left a single negligence claim standing—shrinking the case to ordinary MICRA damages. That ruling was the case.
Counsel avoided the known Kurwa trap: rather than dismiss the remainder without prejudice and preserve them under a tolling deal (the move the Court rejected as manufactured jurisdiction in Kurwa v. Kislinger (2013) 57 Cal.4th 1097), he dismissed with prejudice, reserved nothing, and filed a declaration disclosing that the sole purpose was to expedite appeal. He had solid authority behind that move—Ashland Chemical Co. v. Provence (1982) 129 Cal.App.3d 790, Austin v. Valverde (2012) 211 Cal.App.4th 546, Flowers v. Prasad (2015) 238 Cal.App.4th 930, and Stewart v. Colonial Western Agency, Inc. (2001) 87 Cal.App.4th 1006 all treated a dismissal like his as appealable. But Yancey v. Fink (1991) 226 Cal.App.3d 1334 said the opposite: a voluntary dismissal is a clerk's ministerial act, and a plaintiff isn't aggrieved by her own dismissal. That conflict is what drew review.
The holding: dismiss before the trial court finally resolves any pleaded claim, and the dismissal terminates the action and forfeits the right to appeal. The clerk's entry adjudicates nothing—there's no judgment to appeal from. Austin and Flowers are disapproved outright; the Stewart passage is disapproved to the extent it says otherwise. Pull all three from your form file.
The fix. If you're stuck with a gutted complaint, get to a real judgment instead:
A writ petition is the fallback, but the odds of a grant are low.
Left open. The Court didn't decide whether an appeal can lie from a dismissal that follows an order resolving the entire case. That leaves multi-party cases exposed: if one party's claims die on summary adjudication (not independently appealable) and the rest end later by another party's voluntary dismissal, no judgment is ever entered—and because the appeal clock runs from notice of an appealable order, you can't be sure your time to appeal isn't already running.
