§ 2025.010.Persons and entities within the state subject to deposition

This section opens the deposition chapter with the basic grant of authority: any party may take the oral deposition of any person in California, and that authority reaches every kind of witness a case might need testimony from, not only people. The deponent can be a natural person, a public or private corporation, a partnership, an association, or a governmental agency.

The grant comes with two built-in guardrails. What a party may ask about is bounded by the scope-of-discovery chapter that opens the Civil Discovery Act, and how a party may go about it is bounded by the chapter governing the methods and sequence of discovery generally. Read this section as the doorway into the deposition chapter that follows: it says depositions are available, and against whom, while the chapters it cross-references say what can be asked and how the tool fits with the rest of discovery.