From the Editor
Jeffrey Isaac Ehrlich Editor-in-Chief
Recent cases of interest to members of the plaintiff’s bar Cabral v. Ralphs Grocery Co.
Jeffrey Isaac Ehrlich Editor-in-Chief
(2011) __ Cal.4th __ , 2011 WL 677396 (Cal. Supreme) Who needs to know about this case:
Lawyers handling negligence claims; lawyers handling cases involving traffic collisions between autos and parked vehicles Why it’s important: Clarifies the
Jeffrey Isaac Ehrlich About
this Issue
rules that California courts must employ to determine whether a duty of care exists; clarifies that the Rowland v. Christian factors are used to determine whether to make an exception to the ordinary duty of care imposed by Civil Code section 1714; clarifies that duty is not defined based on case-specific facts, and courts should therefore not find that no duty exists unless they can for- mulate a generally-applicable legal rule; affirms verdict against truck driver for parking alongside freeway. Synopsis: Decedent Cabral lost con-
trol of his automobile while driving on I-10 and was killed when he crashed into the back of a Ralphs’ tractor-trailer rig that was parked 16 feet from the roadway. The driver had parked to have a snack. A jury apportioned 90 percent of the fault for the accident to Cabral and 10 percent to Ralphs and its driver. The Court of Appeal held that the trial court should have granted a JNOV because Ralphs owed no duty to Cabral as a matter of law, because parking its truck in an “emergency parking only” area could not be the proximate cause of the accident as a matter of law, and because the court believed that the testi- mony of plaintiff’s traffic-reconstruction expert was too speculative. A unanimous Supreme Court reversed. Under Civil Code section 1714,
each person has a duty to use ordinary care and is liable for injuries caused by
92— The Advocate Magazine APRIL 2011
his failure to exercise reasonable care in the circumstances. The factors articulat- ed in Rowland v. Christian are applied to determine whether public policy may justify a departure from this general duty. The Rowland factors are the fore- seeability of harm to the plaintiff, the degree of certainty that the plaintiff suf- fered injury, the closeness of the con- nection between the defendant’s con- duct and the injury suffered, the moral blame attached to the defendant’s con- duct, the policy of preventing future harm, the extent of the burden to the defendant and consequences to the community of imposing a duty to exer- cise care with resulting liability for breach, and the availability, cost, and prevalence of insurance for the risk involved. The Rowland factors are to be evalu-
ated at a broad level of factual generali- ty. The issue is whether “carving out an entire category of cases from that gener- al duty rule is justified by clear consider- ations of policy.” By making exceptions to Civil Code section 1714’s general duty of ordinary care only when foresee- ability and policy considerations justify a categorical no-duty rule, the Court pre- serves the crucial distinction between a determination that the defendant owed the plaintiff no duty of ordinary care, which is for the court to make, and a determination that the defendant did not breach the duty of ordinary care, which in a jury trial is for the jury to make.
“On the facts of a particular case, a
trial or appellate court may hold that no reasonable jury could find the defen- dant failed to act with reasonable pru- dence under the circumstances. Such a holding is simply to say that as a matter of law the defendant did not breach his or her duty of care, i.e., was not negligent
Appellate reports and Cases in Brief this Issue
About
toward the plaintiff under the circum- stances shown by the evidence. But the legal decision that an exception to Civil Code section 1714 is warranted, so that the defendant owed no duty to the plain- tiff, or owed only a limited duty, is to be made on a more general basis suitable to the formulation of a legal rule, in most cases preserving for the jury the fact-specific question of whether or not the defendant acted reasonably under the circumstances.” Hence, on the question of duty pre-
sented in the case, “the factual details of the accident are not of central impor- tance. That Horn parked 16 feet from the outermost traffic lane, rather than six feet or 26 feet; that parking for emergencies was permitted in the dirt area where Horn parked; that Cabral likely left the highway because he fell asleep and not from distraction or intoxication – “none of these are critical to whether Horn owed Cabral a duty of ordinary care.” “These facts may have been important to the jury’s determina- tions of negligence, causation and com- parative fault, but on duty California law looks to the entire ‘category of negli- gent conduct,’ not to particular parties in a narrowly defined set of circum- stances.” The Court held that the general
duty of due care indisputably applies to the operation of a motor vehicle, the issue before it is properly stated as whether a categorical exemption from the general rule should be made exempting drivers from potential liabili- ty to other freeway users for stopping alongside a freeway. The Court held that the Rowland factors did not support a departure from the ordinary duty of care. In particular, the fact that emer- gency parking was permitted in the spot where Horn stopped did not make it
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