Laws about equal paid, gun control and cell phones are a few of the new your laws going into effect in California and some entertainment ideas for a happy new year celebration in your own cozy living room. This is KPBS Midday Edition. I'm Maureen Cavanaugh. It is Friday, December 30. Our top story unmute addition after all the New Year's toaster over there are a lot of laws that go into effect in California. Some were approved by voters and some by the legislator. They include tighter gun control, wage discrimination and then there are the new things you can't do on your cell phone while you are driving. Joining me to discuss the new laws is our legal analyst Dan Eaton , partner, Seltzer Caplan McMahon Vitek . Welcome to the program. Thank you very much. The minimum-wage pumps up to $10.50 an hour for businesses with 26 or more employees and the city of San Diego has a higher minimum wage taken into effective. There is another big wage law going into effect preventing wage discrimination based on race or ethnicity, isn't that right quick It expanded a law that was enacted last year, which said that a business could not pay men and women differently for substantially similar work unless the business to show that it resulted from gender-neutral differences. This new law expanded the protection to differences in pay that are affected to employees with different races. Do you see this as leading to a lot of lawsuits? I see it leading to some very important lawsuits and I say that because no court has ruled on this and a prediction I made recently is I think this is going to be the year where we are going to get some judicial clarification of what similar work really means and what employer has to do to show that neutral difference is whether gender-neutral or race neutral differences are sufficient to defend gaps that are naturally going to appear in any market based economy. There are number of gun laws going into effect in California among the most would make it illegal to hold on to ammunition magazines that hold more than 10 rounds. What are they supposed to do if they possess these magazines? The statue gives you Reporter: Options. One is removed them from the state and they have until July 1 to sell the magazines to a license firearm dealer or to destroy these large capacity magazines and to surrender them to a law enforcement authority. These gun restrictions go into effect in California at the very time that the administration is changing in Washington DC. Do you think these laws will become before a Donald Trump Supreme Court quick I think some of them might. There has been some discussion among Second Amendment activists that one new restriction that would eliminate the use of semantic weapons would be challenged. This ultimately will percolate in other states up to the Supreme Court and will have to decide how many restrictions are too many before the [ Indiscernible ] essentially distinguish. Many remember Brock Turner the Stanford University student who was convicted of sexually assaulting an unconscious woman and given an extremely short six-month jail sentence. How will similar cases be handled in the future? It is not going to be an option. Mr. Turner received a sentence of six months with three years probation and he only ended up serving three months. There was as you pointed out a great deal of outrage. In response they said we are not going to allow any more probation when you are talking about a rape and sodomy are penetration with a foreign object for postal use of conscience or consent due to intoxication. The bottom line is there are going to be longer sentences because he could be sentenced up to 14 years. The ACLU came out strongly against it saying in the future the people who are convicted are going to be minorities and people who don't have the means of Mr. Turner so the harsher sentences will be visited upon them. How this law plays out is going to be an interesting one to watch. The law that might affect the most people involves increasing the number things you cannot do on your cell phone while you're driving. The fact is that the law is designed to eliminate texting while driving. The law have not kept up with the advances on what these wireless devices can do. So what they did was they said don't do stuff involving your hands when you are driving that is going to result in destruction unless two things are present one the thing is mounted on your center test counsel or your windshield or you are using your hand to swipe or to enable a feature. They said the law as it had previously existed applies to conversing or texting and do not apply to the full range of things that you can do with these devices. They sought to plug that loophole and we hope that because of that that these features can do and virtually on a daily basis. That is just one of many laws going into effect. I've been speaking with Dan Eaton , partner, Seltzer Caplan McMahon Vitek . Happy new year. Happy new year to you too.
After all the New Year's toasts are over, there are a bevy of new laws that go into effect in California.
They include restrictions on using smartphone apps while driving and boosts to the local and state minimum wages. But employment lawyer Dan Eaton will be paying special attention to new anti-discrimination rules which will prevent employers from paying workers of different races or ethnicities different wages as long as they're doing "substantially similar" work. It's an extension of a provision from 2015 that barred wage discrimination based on gender, but that law hasn't yet been tested in the courts, according to Eaton, a partner at the San Diego firm Seltzer Caplan McMahon Vitek.
“This is going to be the year where we are going to get some judicial clarification of what ‘substantially similar’ work really means and what an employer actually has to do to show that neutral differences, whether gender-neutral or race-neutral differences, are sufficient to defend gaps that are naturally going to appear in any market-based economy,” Eaton said.
Eaton also predicts California's expanded gun regulations, which will ban magazines that hold more than 10 rounds and require background checks to buy ammunition, are the new laws most likely to end up before the U.S. Supreme Court.
RELATED: California Gun Sales Up Ahead Of New Gun Control Limits
Eaton joins KPBS Midday Edition on Friday with a roundup of other upcoming state laws.
