Apropos my post the other day about Alan Palimter's smackdown of footnotes, Keith Paul Bishop passed along a link to a 2018 post of his, in which he observes:
My question for today is whether it is legal to use footnotes. It turns out that this is a question that the California legislature has actually addressed in statute. For example, Section 1363(c) of the California Health & Safety Code provides:
"Nothing in this section shall prevent a plan from using appropriate footnotes or disclaimers to reasonably and fairly describe coverage arrangements in order to clarify any part of the matrix that may be unclear."
In other cases, however, the legislature discourages, but doesn't prohibit, footnotes. See, for example, Insurance Code Section 10509.950 that provides:
"Insurers should, as far as possible, eliminate the use of footnotes and caveats and define terms used in the illustration in language that is understandable by a typical person within the segment of the public to which the illustration is directed."
The SEC's Regulation S-K includes numerous references to footnotes and in some cases actually requires footnote disclosure. See, e.g., Instruction 1 to Item 402(c)(2)(v) and (vi)
In short, California never met anything it didn't think was worth regulating. Including footnotes.
Keith goes on to discuss Gibbon's use of footnotes, which (I must confess) was news to me.