A new round of California laws takes effect July 1, 2026, joining several already in force since January. Out of the hundreds on the books, I picked a few likely to reach you directly: the food in your refrigerator, the driverless car in the next lane, and the animal on your windowsill that is, at this moment, ignoring you.

The Kitchen

Finally, a practical law. You can now retire the sniff test performed at arm’s length over a yogurt in the refrigerator found behind the ground beef you could have sworn was in the freezer

The hieroglyphic dates stamped on our food, “sell by,” “best by,” “enjoy by,” “freshest when used by,” and dozens of other phrases, all fighting for seniority, never clarity, were rarely the deadlines we treated them as. AB 660 ends the guessing and reduces the vocabulary to four phrases. For quality, “best if used by” or “best if frozen by.” For safety, “use by” or “use or freeze by.” Eggs and infant formula are excused.

It turns out, the “sell by” date was never for consumers. It was a note from the manufacturer to the grocer about stock rotation. Consumers were not the intended audience. So we read a date meant for someone else, got confused, erred on the side of caution, and threw out a carton that had done nothing wrong. The yogurt, in other words, was framed. The new law lets retailers keep the rotation information in coded form, so the grocer still knows what to pull, and the rest of us can finally interpret the date without a decoder.

This law is not insignificant. AB 660’s co-sponsor, Californians Against Waste, counts more than fifty different date labels in circulation across the country. This has left consumers standing at the open refrigerator door, squinting at a smeared stamp of ink, deciding whether the carton is dinner or evidence. When the label wins, the food hits the trash and we order takeout. CalRecycle estimates that Californians throw out about 2.5 billion meals of perfectly good food every year, nearly half of everything the state sends to its landfills.

The fix: four agreed-upon phrases. Occam’s razor wins again: the simplest answer was the correct one. The guessing stops, and the yogurt walks.

The Self-Driving Car

Issuing a traffic ticket has always depended on one thing: a driver to hand it to. California spent the last couple of years discovering what happens when there isn’t a driver.

For those of us old enough to remember The Jetsons, Hanna-Barbera was ahead of its time. It gave us a sky full of self-driving cars and a robot named Rosey decades before any of it felt plausible. What the cartoon never showed was the part where Rosey decided to play by her own rules. California has logged a growing number of reports of autonomous vehicles running stop signs, blocking intersections, and other traffic violations. Apparently, robots can be lawless too. AB 1777 responded in kind: law enforcement can now ticket the company that runs the fleet when one of

its cars breaks the law. The law also requires each fleet to run a hotline, staffed around the clock by an actual human, so that a first responder stuck behind a stopped robotaxi who refuses to move, has someone to call.

The Cat

Now to the windowsill, and the only one on the list who is purring with delight.

As of January 1, it is illegal in California to declaw a cat. There is only one exception. A licensed veterinarian may do it when it is medically necessary for the animal’s own health.

The key phrase is “medically necessary.” Protecting the sofa is not medically necessary. Neither is the armrest, the curtains, or your forearm. Declawing is a painful procedure that removes the top part of a cat’s toe bone, not just nail, and the Legislature has correctly concluded that the cat outranks your upholstery.

In the end it was a simple contest: your furniture or the cat. The Legislature picked the cat, and the cat expected nothing less.

The Takeaway

The yogurt has been cleared, the driverless car can finally be held accountable, and the cat has since informed the sofa that it is living on borrowed time. To learn about additional new laws taking effect in 2026, visit https://www.gov.ca.gov/2025/12/31/new-in-2026-california-laws-taking-effect-in-the-new-year/

Traci Mason is an attorney at Porter Simon, where she practices family law. She serves as a member of the Board of Trustees for Tahoe Expedition Academy, a member of the Board of Directors for the Humane Society of Truckee-Tahoe and is a member of the Town of Truckee Chief of Police Advisement Committee. Traci can be reached at mason@portersimon.com

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice.