In this case it wasn't really CA, it was a judge who interpreted an existing law, and the judge may have been completely correct based on the language of the law. The legislature apparently didn't foresee the issue with crew when they wrote the law, but they (and the governor) fixed it quickly enough.

In some cases the judicial system can find enough wiggle room in a law to apply a common sense interpretation. But only up to point, take that too far and now you have activist judges making up their own laws. If the language isn't tight enough, the correct judicial process is to send it back to the folks who wrote it, who do have a legal and constitutional mandate to change it as needed. That appears to be what happened here.