§ 916.Proceedings In Trial Court Stayed Upon Perfection of Appeal; Trial Court Jurisdiction When Stay Other Than Enforcement of Judgment

This section is the anchor for everything else in the chapter. File a valid notice of appeal and, as a rule, the trial court's hands come off the judgment or order under review — not just enforcement, but any proceeding on a matter the judgment embraces or affects. The trial court keeps working on anything else in the case that the appeal doesn't touch.

That default only holds until one of the listed exceptions kicks in. Sections 917.1 through 917.10 carve out specific kinds of judgments — money judgments, orders to deliver property, injunctions, custody orders, and more — where the appeal does not stay enforcement unless the appellant posts an undertaking or another condition is met. Small claims judgments get their own carve-out in § 116.810. Read together, § 916 sets the baseline and the rest of this chapter spells out where that baseline doesn't apply.

Subdivision (b) handles a subtler case: when the stay covers something other than enforcement of the judgment itself. In that situation the trial court keeps jurisdiction to enforce the judgment and to handle any other matter in the action the judgment doesn't affect, even while the rest of the case sits stayed.