Case Title: O'Neill v. Windshire-Copeland Associates

Citation: 

Docket Number: 031824

State: virginia

Court: Virginia Supreme Court

Date: 2004-04-23T00:00:00Z

Document:
Present:  All the Justices 
 
KANEY F. O'NEILL 
 
v.  Record No. 031824     OPINION BY JUSTICE ELIZABETH B. LACY 
 
 
 
April 23, 2004 
WINDSHIRE-COPELAND 
ASSOCIATES, L.P., ET AL. 
 
UPON A QUESTION OF LAW CERTIFIED BY THE UNITED STATES 
COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE FOURTH CIRCUIT 
 
 
On July 30, 2003, the United States Court of Appeals for 
the Fourth Circuit entered an order of certification 
requesting that we exercise our certification jurisdiction, 
Va. Const. art. VI, § 1, Rule 5:42, and answer the following 
question: 
If the defendant-owner of an apartment building 
is negligent per se because the protective 
railing on its apartment balcony does not 
comply with the height requirements of a 
municipal building code, and if that negligence 
is a proximate cause of the plaintiff's fall 
from the balcony and her resulting injuries, is 
the plaintiff's contributory negligence 
available to the defendant as a complete 
defense? 
 
Resolving the issue will determine the outcome of the 
proceeding in the Court of Appeals.  We accepted the certified 
question by order entered October 28, 2003.  For the reasons 
stated below, we answer the certified question in the 
affirmative. 
 
The order of certification from the Court of Appeals sets 
forth the following facts.  Kaney F. O'Neill became a 
quadriplegic when she fell backward over a second-story 
balcony railing at an apartment complex in Newport News, 
Virginia, on September 15, 1999.  When the apartment was built 
in 1963, the Newport News Building Code required such balcony 
railings to be forty-eight (48) inches high.  See Code of City 
of Newport News § 10-3 (1962) (incorporating the National 
Building Code); Nat'l Bldg. Code § 605.4 (1955).  The balcony 
railing at issue here, however, was only thirty-two (32) 
inches high.1  
 
O'Neill filed suit in the United States District Court 
for the Eastern District of Virginia, asserting that the owner 
of the apartment complex, Windshire-Copeland Associates, L.P.; 
its general partner, Robert Copeland; and the management 
company for the apartment complex, Hercules Real Estate 
Services, Inc., (collectively "Windshire") were negligent 
because the balcony's height did not comply with the 
requirements of the Newport News Building Code at the time the 
apartment complex was built and that such negligence was a 
proximate cause of her injuries.  At trial, testimony was 
admitted showing that O'Neill was familiar with the balcony 
and that she had consumed alcohol prior to the accident. 
                     
1 Virginia adopted a statewide building code in 1973 that 
requires balcony railings to be at least forty-two (42) inches 
high. 
 
2
 
At the close of the evidence, the trial court held 
Windshire negligent per se because its balcony violated the 
height requirement of the Newport News Building Code.  The 
trial court also held that Windshire's negligence did not bar 
its defense of contributory negligence and, accordingly, 
submitted that issue to the jury.  The jury found O'Neill 
contributorily negligent.  Based on that finding, the trial 
court entered judgment in favor of Windshire, and O'Neill 
appealed that judgment to the United States Court of Appeals 
for the Fourth Circuit. 
DISCUSSION 
 
The discussion by the Court of Appeals, in its 
certification order, and the arguments the parties advanced 
focused primarily on whether Virginia has adopted § 483 of the 
Restatement (Second) of Torts (1965).  That section provides 
that, when a defendant's negligence consists of the violation 
of a statute, a plaintiff's contributory negligence bars his 
recovery for injuries caused by the negligence of the 
defendant "unless the effect of the statute is to place the 
entire responsibility for such harm as has occurred upon the 
defendant."  Comment (c) to § 483 explains that a statute 
places the entire responsibility for harm on the defendant 
"where it is enacted in order to protect a certain class of 
persons against their own inability to protect themselves."  
 
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Restatement (Second) of Torts § 483, cmt. c, at p. 539 (1965).  
Comment (d) goes on to state that even though "those for whose 
benefit the statute is enacted may be expected to be, and are 
in fact, fully able to protect themselves," the statute may 
nevertheless relieve such persons from doing so and place on 
the defendant the entire responsibility for avoiding the harm. 
 
O'Neill maintains that the concept embodied in § 483 is 
one "firmly entrenched in the common law" and "embraced for 
nearly a century by this Court."  Applying that concept here, 
O'Neill argues that the building code is one of those statutes 
that places on the defendant the responsibility for injury 
resulting from a violation of its provisions and, thus, 
O'Neill's negligence should not defeat her recovery. 
As O'Neill acknowledges, the cases upon which she 
primarily relies for the proposition that Virginia has adopted 
the concepts embodied in § 483 of the Restatement, Atlantic 
Coast Line R. Co. v. Bell, 149 Va. 720, 141 S.E. 838 (1928), 
Clinchfield Coal Corp. v. Hawkins, 130 Va. 698, 108 S.E. 704 
(1921), and Carter Coal Co. v. Bates, 127 Va. 586, 105 S.E. 76 
(1920), addressed whether a defendant could plead the 
assumption of the risk defense when the defendant's violation 
of a statutory requirement was a proximate cause of the 
 
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plaintiff's injury.2  The theory of the defendants advanced in 
those cases was that the plaintiffs had known that the 
defendants had not complied with the statutory requirement 
and, therefore, the plaintiffs had assumed the risk of harm 
resulting from such lack of compliance. 
The seminal case in this Commonwealth rejecting an 
attempt by a defendant to raise the assumption of the risk 
defense under these circumstances involved a coal company's 
failure to provide for a "conspicuous light" on the front and 
rear of coal hauling machinery as required by statute.  Carter 
Coal, 127 Va. at 598-99, 105 S.E. at 80.  The Court’s decision 
in that case was based on the principle that, if the mining-
safety legislation at issue had not abrogated this common law 
defense, the "systematic violation" of the statute through the 
purported risk-assumption by the plaintiff would defeat the 
statute's purpose.  Id. at 601-02, 105 S.E. at 81.  As we 
later stated in Atlantic Coastline: 
                     
2 O'Neill also relies upon Gallagher v. Stathis, 186 Va. 
444, 43 S.E.2d 33 (1947), for her position that Virginia has 
recognized and adopted § 483.  In Gallagher, the trial court 
refused a jury instruction that the plaintiffs were 
contributorily negligent because they agreed to live in a 
house with only one staircase in violation of the building 
code.  This Court affirmed the trial court's action because 
there was no evidence to support the granting of an 
instruction on the theory of contributory negligence, id. at 
451, 44 S.E.2d at 37, and any implication to be drawn from the 
citation to foreign authority on the issue of the availability 
 
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[I]f the employer may avail himself of the 
defense that the employee agreed in advance that 
the statute should be disregarded, the court 
would be measuring the rights of the persons whom 
the law makers intended to protect by the common 
law standard of the reasonably prudent person, 
and not by the definite standard set up by the 
legislature.  This would be practically a 
judicial repeal of the act. 
 
149 Va. at 735, 141 S.E. at 842, citing 18 R.C.L. § 169 at 
680-81 (1917) (quoting D.H. Davis Coal Co. v. Polland, 62 N.E. 
492, 496 (Ind. 1902)). 
O'Neill argues that because assumption of the risk and 
contributory negligence are "doctrinally related" and " 'often 
overlap,' " the rationale precluding the defense of assumption 
of the risk in these cases "applies with equal force to the 
defense of contributory negligence."  However, the rationale 
we utilized in Bell and its predecessors for excluding 
assumption of the risk cannot extend to the defense of 
contributory negligence. 
The difference between assumption of the risk and 
contributory negligence as they relate to a defendant’s 
negligence per se stemming from a statutory violation was 
explained in Pocahontas Consolidated Collieries Co. v. 
Johnson, 244 F. 368 (4th Cir. 1917), the case upon which 
                                                                
of contributory fault as a defense was therefore, at most, 
dicta.
 
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Carter Coal relied in rejecting the defense of assumption of 
the risk: 
Assumption of risk and contributory negligence 
stand in a different legal relation to the 
violation of a . . . statute.  Assumption of risk 
imports no delict on the part of an employe[e] 
. . . .  Contributory negligence . . . is a delict 
or neglect of duty by the employe[e], and hence he 
cannot recover for the delict of the employer, 
. . . if his own delict has contributed to his 
injury as a proximate cause. 
 
Id. at 372. 
This fundamental difference between the effect of the 
assumption of the risk and contributory negligence defenses 
negates the proposition that our jurisprudence precluding the 
use of assumption of the risk defense also precludes the use 
of the contributory negligence defense that § 483 of the 
Restatement (Second) of Torts provides. 
Nevertheless, we recognize that there are circumstances 
in which a legislative body may determine that, because of the 
nature of the regulation or the class of persons the 
regulation was intended to protect, the defendant should bear 
the entire responsibility for harm that the failure to comply 
with the regulation causes.  For example, the General Assembly 
has specifically made such a determination in Code § 8.01-58 
by providing that contributory negligence "shall not bar a 
recovery" in actions brought by employees against a common 
carrier where death resulted from the common carrier's 
 
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violation of "any statute enacted for the safety of 
employees."  See also Code §§ 46.2-932.1, -934, 56-416, and 
former Code § 56-417.3
We need not decide here whether application of that 
principle can be implied in statutes that do not specifically 
state that the defense is not available.  In this case, 
nothing in the Newport News Building Code indicates that the 
purpose of the code was to place the entire responsibility for 
injuries stemming from a code violation on the defendant 
building owner.  Unlike Code § 8.01-58, nothing in the Newport 
News Building Code allows recovery regardless of a plaintiff’s 
negligence.  The code protects no specific class; it is the 
public in general that benefits from its provisions.  Indeed, 
a person who never entered a building but only stood outside 
could be injured as a result of a building code violation.  
Nor would allowing the defense of contributory negligence in 
this case defeat the building code's purpose of height 
requirements and "'work a judicial repeal of the Act'" as 
                     
3 Violations of the child labor laws are also not subject 
to the defense of contributory negligence because children 
under the age of 14 are presumed incapable of contributory 
negligence, Virginia Electric and Power Co. v. Dungee, 258 Va. 
235, 246-47, 520 S.E.2d 164, 171 (1999), and, regardless of 
any violation of such laws, child employees are subject to the 
Workers' Compensation Act, Code § 65.2-100, et seq., which 
does not allow the defenses of assumption of the risk or 
contributory negligence.  Roller v. Basic Constr. Co., 238 Va. 
 
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O'Neill asserts.  Only if a combination of a defendant's code 
violation and a plaintiff's independent negligence caused the 
plaintiff's injury would the plaintiff be unable to recover.  
Under these circumstances, allowing a contributory negligence 
defense neither compromises nor subverts the policy advancing 
compliance with the building code. 
For these reasons, we conclude that § 483 of the 
Restatement (Second) has not been adopted in this state and 
hold that the defense of contributory negligence is available 
when the defendant's violation of a municipal building code is 
negligence per se and a proximate cause of the plaintiff's 
injuries. 
Certified question answered in the affirmative.
                                                                
321, 327, 384 S.E.2d 323, 325 (1989); Rasnick v. The Pittston 
Co., 237 Va. 658, 660, 379 S.E.2d 353, 354 (1989). 
 
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