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Cal. Civ. Code § 2899

Priority of Liens

Applied in 13 court decisions — leading case Duck v. Wells Fargo Bank, National Ass'n (In Re Spectra Prism Industries, Inc.) (1983)

Most recently applied in Murdock v. Security State Bank of Harlem (In Re Murdock) (December 1991)

Enacted 1872.

How often courts cite this section

18971920194019601980199130
citing decisions per year

Court decisions citing this, by year. The dip in the last several years is a data-coverage gap, not a real trend — our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so recent citations are undercounted.

Where one has a lien upon several things, and other persons have subordinate liens upon, or interests in, some but not all of the same things, the person having the prior lien, if he can do so without risk of loss to himself, or of injustice to other persons, must resort to the property in the following order, on the demand of any party interested:

1. To the things upon which he has an exclusive lien;

2. To the things which are subject to the fewest subordinate liens;

3. In like manner inversely to the number of subordinate liens upon the same thing; and,

4. When several things are within one of the foregoing classes, and subject to the same number of liens, resort must be had—

(1.) To the things which have not been transferred since the prior lien was created;

(2.) To the things which have been so transferred without a valuable consideration; and,

(3.) To the things which have been so transferred for a valuable consideration in the inverse order of the transfer.

Official source: California Legislative Information. Reproduced from public-domain California statutes; confirm against the official source for the current text. Not legal advice.