Going To Law School

Say the hotel staff knows the guests are throwing chairs out the window and some dude gets hurt by it ... is the hotel staff liable for the injuries to that third party based on the actions of the guest, or is it simple nonfeasance? How is duty argued here? Is there a general rule or is it always up to arguing special relationships?

Well, I guess there can never be a general of duty for nonfeasance, but I don't know. I guess I'll look it up.

Did you guys suffer through this in your class?

Oh, I guess the court in that case used the duty test to impose a new duty

and absent particular circumstances specific to the case to impose a duty, and no special relationship, no duty, and thus no case. Sorry, I'm still working this duty shit out ... it seems like it's the absolute most important part of torts.

Well, if you're talking about special duties to CONTROL the actions of a person, the people that you're calling "third parties" are the only ones that are going to be claiming any liability in the first place. I think you're confusing a duty TO someone else with a duty to control someone else. The whole point of the duty to control cases is that a third party was injured.

Tarasoff is the only case you've named so far that we did. That one is kind of a mindfuck really. My professor totally hates the holding. But in that one the court does say there's a special relationship created because it's a therapist and a patient. The court says that the therapist was negligent in failing to warn the intended victim.

I didn't confuse that. I'm saying, how does one argue duty if presented with a new fact pattern absent a clearly defined special relationship? I read the holding of the case and it just used circumstances of the facts in the case ... foreseeability, knowledge, position to do something, etc. etc.

If you're specifically talking about a failure to control/failure to act case, then yes, you usually need a special relationship between the defendant and the person whose conduct they were allegedly supposed to contorl. If not, you don't have to go creating new duties.

For the record, the court says that "plaintiffs' pleadings... establish as between Poddar and defendant therapists the special relation that arises between a patient and his doctor or psychotherapist. Such a relationship may support affirmative duties for the benefit of third persons. Thus, for example, a hospital must exercise reasonable care to control the behavior of a patient which may endanger other persons..."

Tarasoff is creating a new duty, though ... before that case, that duty did not exist. Before Tarasoff that special relationship did not exist

hence why it's so controversial among torts professors. I guess it's totally pointless to worry about it

Tarasoff is the case where the court uses a bunch of guidelines of the duty principle to craft the "doctor patient" duty ... and tons of jurisdictions refuse to acknowledge it.

You are correct.

Although many jurisdictions do recognize it.

There are also other things to consider that seem overlooked in Tarasoff -- for example, even if he had a duty to warn and failed to do so, how the fuck do you prove causation? If he had warned her, what exactly would she have done?

I take it your professor is into the "duty to control" cases. We didn't spend much time on that. Obviously it's good to be attuned to what your professor is into.

Oh man, my brain is fried, I'm done for the night. I just psyched myself out that I was totally dead wrong about this stuff. As far as causation goes, it's interesting ... is the doctor's failure to warn even a cause in fact to the murder? Even if it did survive cause in fact, what about proximate cause? Though I think that's the heart of the foreseeability argument the defense/dissent relies on.

Yeah, that's kind of what I'm saying. Obviously the court found him liable. But there seems to be a huge cause-in-fact problem, not to mention proximate cause. Courts do shit wrong all the time.

as in, "the doctor's negligence did not proximately cause the murder because the predictions of murder are normally incorrect, and thus there's no real foreseeability to a patient comitting a murder who says they're going to do so." foreseeability being a component of the whole scope-of-the-risk test for legal cause. right???

Our torts professor said this result is huuuuuuuuuuuugely controversial, and now I'm seeing why.

Yeah, that's certainly one way you could argue it.

though if they got to causation, would they be assuming in their argument that "even if the doctor had the duty ..., causation isn't even met"

You might even be able to argue it on standard-of-care/risk-balancing analysis, i.e. "Expecting a psychotherapist to warn about every patient threat places a very high burden on the profession (particularly since it damages doctor-patient trust), and the probability of harm is very low since most patient statements about intent to do harm are never acted upon."

xpost, yeah I think it's always good to do the "even if" thing on an exam -- cover all bases.

Oh, like running it through a Hand Formula type thing? burden high, risk low though potential damages being huuuuuge.

yes exactly

what I'm annoyed about is, our last class was Friday ... and we had a shitload of new reading for Friday. and our exam is Wednesday! I've been studying since Saturday.

as in, this Wednesday. 4 free days to study. for a year's worth of torts. closed book.

yeah, my torts is closed book too. Honestly I'd rather take that one first. Feel much more ready for that.

Oh well, tomorrow I'm going to do the two practice exams we have for this guy and bone up on all this shit. I don't even hear my classmates debate duty, causation, etc., so hopefully a lot of them missed the fact that you have to establish these things before you can argue all the fun stuff.

Unless they have hornbooks or commercial guides that give them the inside info on this shit... I see everyone with those.

Does your prof do straight issue spotters?

Yeah, the exam is 2 big issue spotting questions. I already worked through a chunk or two, but not as a whole

It's funny how professors get hung up on certain things -- mine spent an inordinate amount of time on Ranson v. Kittner, Informed Consent and Reasonable Alternative Design.

I have no idea what that is

We spent most of our time on negligence in general (what is the standard of reasonable care? how do statutes affect this? how do circumstances play a role? parties? etc.), duty, and causation. Then we spent about a day on strict liability and a day on intentional harm. But I'd say 75% of the class was just duty and causation as principles.

I hope my other classmates missed the fact that market share liability is a doctrine of causation that must be argued after establishing duty and breach ... :{

Ranson v. Kittner = old case where a hunter accidentally shoots someone's dog thinking it's a wolf
Informed Consent = medical cases where plaintiff wouldn't have consented to certain treatment had they known certain things (usually the risks invovled)
Reasonable Alternative Design = products liability concept -- if you're claiming the design is defective, do you have to show that the company could have made it differently?

Oh, we did an informed consent case... Matthiest. On the syllabus it's under Negligence: Medical Malpractice, Industry Profession and Standards. As in,

I totally forgot about that one. Better revisit it :{}

oh well, that shit's for tomorrow

Guys, please don't cram right up until the exam. Give yourself a good night of sleep before it, and a good breakfast. I know I sound like an overbearing mom or guidance counsellor, but really...at this point, you're at a good place to write a good answer. Take today, and then go to bed reasonably early tonight.

And bathe, Burt. No one likes sitting next to the stinky guy in exams.

It's hard to sleep all that well, especially when they start using jackhammers outside my window at 7:00 am. and I have a groundfloor apartment. NYC's starting to piss me off

and I definitely still need to study ... if they have an Ybarra style res ipsa question on there, if I did nothing today I'd fail it. Time to study.

huh, tarasoff came up in one of my classes, too!

respondeat superior kind-of has a strict liability flavoring to it, right? the policy reasons being they want employers to do make every effort possible to ensure their employees are conducting themselves safely ... am I remembering this right?

nevermind, there are elements of foreseeability involved I think

My professor summed up Ybarra as the court creating a "duty to snitch" -- one party had to be found liable even if all could meet their burden, so the impetus was on the group to give up the individual responsible. The court found that clearly (by inference) one of the medical practitioners involved was responsible, and there was no other way to determine which one.

Yeah. Our professor talked about how that was a controversial decision, too, especially in Texas which basically said "fuck that shit".

We then spent two days debating how one could impose liability across the board on people who comitted the negligent act and those who did not... and I suppose it fit into how market share liability in the DES cases worked, too. Hmmm.

different from market share liability

Of course it's different, but it was the same principle at debate ... Ybarra was one of the central cases used by the plaintiff in Sindell v. Abbott