The California Court of Appeal for the Fifth District has declined to follow decisions from other jurisdictions that have loosened or abandoned the rule that a property owner must have actual or constructive notice of a dangerous condition before being held liable to an injured patron.
Juanita Moore was injured when she slipped and fell on a french fry lying on the floor of a Wal-Mart in Ceres, California. She sued the store and the jury returned a verdict in her favor. Wal-Mart appealed, arguing that the trial court had erred when it failed to instruct the jury that the store could only be held liable if it were shown that it had actual or constructive notice of the presence of the dangerous condition (the french fry). The trial court had rejected the notice requirement, reasoning that Wal-Mart was deemed to have placed itself on notice because “by incorporating a fast food restaurant within the store, Wal-Mart could reasonably anticipate that such a dangerous condition would regularly arise.” That is, the trial court substituted a “foreseeability” standard in place of a “notice” standard as a prerequisite to Wal-Mart’s liability.
The Court of Appeal reversed, holding that the trial court’s reasoning was inconsistent with established California law. The California rule, the court reaffirmed, requires either (1) a showing that the property owner had actual knowledge of a dangerous condition on the premises, or (2) that the property owner had constructive knowledge because the condition had existed long enough that a reasonable property owner would have discovered it. (To avoid the risks of constructive knowledge of a defect, grocery stores and similar public businesses will often schedule frequent -- and documented -- inspections of their premises, so that they can show that a condition had not existed long enough to be reasonably discoverable.)
The decision in Moore v. Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. (Aug. 19. 2003), Case No. F040016, can be found at these links in PDF and Word formats.
Continuation:
Ms. Moore relied on a line of non-California cases, including decisions from Kansas and Hawaii, imposing a “mode-of-operation” rule that “‘looks to a business’s choice of a particular mode of operation and not events surrounding the plaintiff’s accident’” in order to determine whether liability will be imposed. The appellate court refused to endorse that approach:
[U]nder current California law, a store owner’s choice of a particular ‘mode of operation’ does not eliminate a slip-and-fall plaintiff’s burden of proving the owner had knowledge of the dangerous condition that caused the accident. Moreover, it would not be prudent to hold otherwise. Without this knowledge requirement, certain store owners would essentially incur strict liability for slip-and-fall injuries, i.e., they would be insurer’s of the safety of their patrons. For example, whether the french fry was dropped 10 seconds or 10 hours before the accident would be of no consequence to the liability finding. However, this is not to say that a store owner’s business choices do not impact the negligence analysis. If the store owner’s practice create a higher risk that dangerous conditions will exist, ordinary care will require a corresponding increase in precautions.
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