Supreme Court of Texas 

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No. 23-0041 

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Albertsons, LLC d/b/a Randall’s; Albertsons Companies, LLC 

d/b/a Randall’s; Randall’s Food Markets, Inc. d/b/a Randall’s; and 

Randall’s Food & Drugs LP d/b/a Randall’s, 

Petitioners, 

v. 

Maryam Mohammadi, 

Respondent

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On Petition for Review from the 

Court of Appeals for the Fourteenth District of Texas 

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PER CURIAM 

Maryam Mohammadi slipped and fell at a Randalls grocery store. 

She alleged that Randalls failed to properly warn of a puddle that 

formed next to a shopping cart after an employee put leaking items in 

the cart. Randalls obtained a jury verdict in its favor and a take-nothing 

judgment. The jury declined to find Randalls liable under a 

constructive-knowledge standard of premises liability, which asked 

whether Randalls reasonably should have known of the danger. Based 
2 

on that answer, the charge instructed the jury not to answer a question 

about Randalls’s liability under an actual-knowledge standard. 

A divided court of appeals reversed, holding that the jury should 

have been permitted to consider liability under the actual-knowledge 

standard even after finding no liability under the 

constructive-knowledge standard. 656 S.W.3d 851, 864 (Tex. App.—

Houston [14th Dist.] 2022). As explained below, we need not decide 

whether the charge incorrectly instructed the jury not to consider 

liability under an actual-knowledge theory. Any such error would have 

been harmless because there is no evidence Randalls had actual 

knowledge of the wet floor. Since there is no evidence of actual 

knowledge of the danger, no reasonable jury could have answered the 

actual-knowledge question in Mohammadi’s favor, even if we assume 

the court of appeals was correct that the question should have been 

asked. 

The error identified by the court of appeals was therefore 

harmless (assuming it was error at all), which means reversal was not 

proper. See TEX. R. APP. P. 44.1(a). The judgment of the court of appeals 

is reversed, and the judgment of the district court is reinstated. 

I 

Maryam Mohammadi worked at a Wells Fargo located inside a 

Randalls grocery store in Houston. Randalls often placed returned or 

damaged items in shopping carts near the front of the store. 

Mohammadi slipped and fell next to such a shopping cart. Mohammadi 

sued Randalls. 
3 

Some of the facts about the fall were disputed. Mohammadi 

alleged that the shopping cart was the source of the liquid on the floor. 

An inconclusive video seemed to show a store employee placing a wet 

plastic bag in the cart. The footage also showed the store manager 

wiping the floor with a paper towel after Mohammadi’s fall, but he 

testified that the paper towel was not damp when he picked it up. The 

manager also testified that he did not notice any liquid when he 

inspected the floor before and after Mohammadi’s fall, despite claiming 

to have observed liquid on the floor after the accident in the report he 

made at the time. 

Before submitting the case to the jury, the court determined that 

Mohammadi was an invitee, rather than a licensee, at the time of the 

accident. This meant that Mohammadi did not need to prove that 

Randalls actually knew of an unreasonably dangerous condition, as 

would a licensee. See Sampson v. Univ. of Tex. at Austin, 500 S.W.3d 

380, 385 (Tex. 2016). Instead, liability to an invitee can attach if the 

defendant knew of the danger or reasonably should have known of it. 

CMH Homes, Inc. v. Daenen, 15 S.W.3d 97, 101 (Tex. 2000). 

The court bifurcated the premises-liability question. Question 1 

asked about Randalls’s liability under a constructive-knowledge, 

“reasonably should have known of the danger” standard. Question 2 

asked about Randalls’s liability under an actual-knowledge-ofthe-danger standard. The charge instructed the jury not to answer 

Question 2 unless it answered Question 1 in favor of Mohammadi. The 

disputed portion of the charge read: 
4 

QUESTION NO. 1 

Did the negligence, if any, of Randall’s Food & Drug, 

L.P. proximately cause the occurrence in question? 

With respect to the condition of the premises, 

Randall’s Food & Drug, L.P. was negligent if— 

1. the condition posed an unreasonable risk of harm, 

and 

2. Randall’s reasonably should have known of the 

danger, and 

3. Randall’s failed to exercise ordinary care to 

protect Maryam Mohammadi from the danger, by 

both failing to adequately warn Maryam 

Mohammadi of the condition and failing to make 

that condition reasonably safe. 

. . . . 

Answer Question No. 2 if you answered “Yes” to 

Question No. 1. Otherwise, do not answer Question 

No. 2. 

QUESTION NO. 2 

Did the negligence, if any, of Randall’s Food & Drug, 

L.P. proximately cause the occurrence in question? 

With respect to the condition of the premises, 

Randall’s Food & Drug, L.P. was negligent if— 

1. the condition posed an unreasonable risk of harm, 

and 

2. Randall’s knew of the danger, and 

3. Randall’s failed to exercise ordinary care to 

protect Maryam Mohammadi from the danger, by 

both failing to adequately warn Maryam 

Mohammadi of the condition and failing to make 

that condition reasonably safe. 

. . . . 
5 

The jury answered “No” to Question 1 and therefore did not answer 

Question 2. The district court rendered judgment for Randalls. 

Mohammadi appealed. 

The court of appeals reversed, over a dissent. 656 S.W.3d at 865. 

The court concluded “[t]here was no evidence that a Randalls employee 

observed any liquid on the floor where Mohammadi slipped and fell 

before she slipped and fell.” Id. at 863. The court nonetheless concluded 

that Mohammadi was entitled to a jury question on actual knowledge. 

Id. at 864. Relying on this Court’s decision in Corbin v. Safeway Stores, 

Inc., 648 S.W.2d 292 (Tex. 1983), the court of appeals held that Randalls 

could be charged with actual knowledge of the danger even without 

actual knowledge of the wet floor, because its employees knew a leaking 

product placed in a shopping cart would drip onto the floor. 656 S.W.3d 

at 864. 

Randalls raises multiple issues in this Court, but we can resolve 

the case by considering only whether failure to submit the 

actual-knowledge theory of premises liability to the jury was harmful 

error. For the following reasons, it was not. 

II 

The district court and the court of appeals agreed that 

Mohammadi was an invitee, rather than a licensee, at the time of the 

incident. Randalls disagrees and asks us to hold otherwise, but we need 

not resolve that question. We will assume, without deciding, that 

Mohammadi was an invitee. 

An invitee in a premises-liability case “must prove that the 

premises owner had actual or constructive knowledge of a dangerous 
6 

condition on the premises.” Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. v. Reece, 81 S.W.3d 

812, 813 (Tex. 2002) (emphasis added). “Actual knowledge requires 

knowledge that the dangerous condition existed at the time of the 

accident.” Sampson, 500 S.W.3d at 397 (quoting City of Corsicana v. 

Stewart, 249 S.W.3d 412, 414-15 (Tex. 2008)). “[C]onstructive 

knowledge can be established by showing that the condition had existed 

long enough for the owner or occupier to have discovered it upon 

reasonable inspection.” CMH Homes, 15 S.W.3d at 102-03. Unlike 

actual knowledge, constructive knowledge “can be established by facts 

or inferences that a dangerous condition could develop over time.” 

Sampson, 500 S.W.3d at 397. 

We previously approved of the following jury instruction for 

premises liability to an invitee: 

With respect to the condition of the premises, defendant 

was negligent if— 

a. the condition posed an unreasonable risk of harm; 

b. defendant knew or reasonably should have known of 

the danger; and 

c. defendant failed to exercise ordinary care to protect 

plaintiff from danger, by both failing to adequately 

warn plaintiff of the condition and failing to make that 

condition reasonably safe. 

See State v. Williams, 940 S.W.2d 583, 584-85 (Tex. 1996).1 The 

knowledge element of this instruction incorporates both actual 

knowledge and constructive knowledge. A finding that the defendant 

had either form of knowledge is sufficient for liability under the invitee 

1 See also Comm. on Pattern Jury Charges of the State Bar of Tex., 

Texas Pattern Jury Charges—Malpractice, Premises & Products PJC 66.4 

(2020). 
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standard. The instructions used in Mohammadi’s case track this 

standard instruction in many ways, but they deviate with respect to the 

defendant’s knowledge. Question 1 asked whether the defendant 

reasonably should have known of the danger, while Question 2 

separately asked whether the defendant actually knew of it. Neither of 

these questions tracked the usual invitee liability question, which 

incorporates both actual and constructive knowledge. 

In addition to splitting the knowledge elements, the charge made 

the actual-knowledge question contingent on a pro-plaintiff answer to 

the constructive-knowledge question. Thus, because the jury answered 

a question exclusively focused on constructive knowledge against 

Mohammadi, the jury was never asked about Randalls’s actual 

knowledge—as it would have been under the typical invitee jury charge, 

which incorporates both actual and constructive knowledge. 

The parties disagree about the legitimacy of this unusual jury 

charge, but we need not resolve that dispute. Even if Mohammadi and 

the court of appeals are correct that the charge was erroneous, reversal 

of the judgment is not available unless the error probably caused the 

rendition of an improper judgment. See TEX. R. APP. P. 44.1(a); 

Columbia Rio Grande Healthcare, L.P. v. Hawley, 284 S.W.3d 851, 856 

(Tex. 2009). If that standard is not met, then the error is considered 

harmless, and reversal is inappropriate. The question, therefore, is 

whether the jury’s inability to consider actual knowledge probably 

caused the rendition of an improper take-nothing judgment for 

Randalls. For the following reasons, it did not. 
8 

As the charge reflects, the parties tried the case with both a 

constructive-knowledge theory of liability and an actual-knowledge 

theory of liability in mind. If a verdict for Mohammadi on the 

actual-knowledge question would have been properly discarded for 

legally insufficient evidence, then there is no harm in having not asked 

the question, because even a pro-Mohammadi answer to the question 

would not have resulted in judgment for Mohammadi. See, e.g., 4Front 

Engineered Sols., Inc. v. Rosales, 505 S.W.3d 905, 908-09 (Tex. 2016).

We must therefore ask whether the jury heard evidence that was legally 

sufficient to support a finding that “Randall’s knew of the danger” that 

caused Mohammadi’s accident. See supra Question 2.2

To answer that question, we must first correctly identify the 

“danger” or “condition” at issue. If the relevant danger is the wet floor, 

then—as the court of appeals observed—there was no evidence before 

the jury that any Randalls employee actually knew of the danger prior 

to Mohammadi’s fall. 656 S.W.3d at 863. If, however, the danger was 

the presence of leaking items in the shopping cart, then there was 

evidence that employees knew of the danger. 

Our precedent dictates that the wet floor, not the antecedent 

situation that produced it, is the relevant danger or condition about 

which the defendant’s knowledge is relevant. An “unreasonably 

2 The legal-sufficiency standard is familiar. “When determining 

whether legally sufficient evidence supports a jury finding, we must consider 

evidence favorable to the finding if a reasonable factfinder could and disregard 

evidence contrary to the finding unless a reasonable factfinder could not. The 

evidence is legally sufficient if [there] is more than a scintilla of evidence on 

which a reasonable juror could find the fact to be true.” 4Front, 505 S.W.3d at 

908-09 (citations omitted). 
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dangerous condition for which a premises owner may be liable is the 

condition at the time and place injury occurs, not some antecedent 

situation that produced the condition.” Brookshire Grocery Co. v. Taylor, 

222 S.W.3d 406, 407 (Tex. 2006). 

In Brookshire, we held that the ice on the floor, not the grocery 

store’s drink dispenser from which “ice fell to the floor . . . on a daily 

basis,” was the dangerous condition about which the defendant’s 

knowledge mattered. Id. at 406-09. Prior to Brookshire, we had already 

followed this approach on multiple occasions. For example, “water on 

the floor of a basketball court could be an unreasonably dangerous 

condition, but not the leaky roof that would eventually allow water to 

drip.” Id. at 408 (summarizing City of San Antonio v. Rodriguez, 931 

S.W.2d 535, 536 (Tex. 1996)). Similarly, “stairs were [not] unreasonably 

dangerous merely because the premises owner knew they would 

eventually become unstable with use.” Id. at 407 (summarizing CMH 

Homes, 15 S.W.3d at 100-01). 

Under Brookshire and similar cases, the court of appeals in this 

case should have stopped after concluding that “[t]here was no evidence 

that a Randalls employee observed any liquid on the floor where 

Mohammadi slipped and fell.” 656 S.W.3d at 863. The court of appeals 

instead relied on our decision in Corbin v. Safeway Stores to hold that 

the defendant’s knowledge of the antecedent situation—a leaking bag in 

a wire shopping cart—could amount to actual knowledge of the danger 

for purposes of premises liability. 656 S.W.3d at 864. 

In Corbin, another grocery store case, the plaintiff slipped on 

grapes that had fallen out of a self-service bin. 648 S.W.2d at 294. The 
10 

Court determined that the store’s self-service method of displaying 

grapes “posed an unreasonable risk” of customers slipping on the grapes 

that would inevitably fall to the floor. Id. at 297. The Court concluded 

that a jury could find the store liable because the store was aware of the 

antecedent condition—grapes available for customer access above a 

linoleum floor—that posed this unreasonable risk, even in the “absence 

of evidence showing the storeowner’s actual or constructive knowledge 

of the presence on the floor of the specific object causing the fall.” Id. at 

295. 

We have since distanced ourselves from this “exceptional case.” 

See Brookshire, 222 S.W.3d at 408. Over the years, this Court has had 

several opportunities to apply Corbin but has declined to do so. See, e.g., 

CMH Homes, 15 S.W.3d at 101 (“[T]he facts of this case are not 

congruent with those in Corbin.”); Brookshire, 222 S.W.3d at 408 (“This 

case is not like Corbin.”); Christ v. Tex. Dep’t of Transp., 664 S.W.3d 82, 

90 (Tex. 2023) (“As in those cases [in which the Court distinguished 

Corbin], nothing here suggests the use of stripes and buttons was any 

more dangerous than their use on other roads.”). 

Corbin does not control this case. More recent precedent points 

definitively in the opposite direction. See Brookshire, 222 S.W.3d at 408. 

To the extent Corbin’s approach could ever be employed after our more 

recent cases, it would only be in a situation where—as in Corbin—the 

defendant had a policy or practice that it knew routinely created an 

unreasonable risk of harm. In Corbin, the store “admitted that at the 

time of [the plaintiff’s] fall it knew of this unusually high risk associated 

with its grape display.” 648 S.W.2d at 296. In this case, by contrast, 
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“[t]here is no evidence that employees knew that putting returned goods 

in a wire shopping cart led to spills on the floor.” 656 S.W.3d at 867 

(Christopher, C.J., dissenting). Unlike the grape display in Corbin, the 

method that Randalls used to store damaged and returned goods did not 

“constitute[] a dangerous condition from the moment it was used,” nor 

did it “inherently present[] an unreasonable risk of harm.” See CMH 

Homes, 15 S.W.3d at 101-02. The evidence may have shown that a 

Randalls employee knowingly placed a leaking bag in the cart on the 

day of Mohammadi’s fall, but there was no evidence that Randalls had 

a policy or practice of leaving leaky bags in shopping carts or that 

Randalls knew the problem routinely recurred. 

These distinctions prevent application of Corbin to this case. 

Instead, we again apply the rule from Brookshire: the “unreasonably 

dangerous condition for which a premises owner may be liable is the 

condition at the time and place injury occurs, not some antecedent 

situation that produced the condition.” 222 S.W.3d at 407. Under this 

standard, evidence that an employee knew a leaking bag was placed in 

a shopping cart cannot demonstrate Randalls’s actual knowledge of the 

wet floor on which Mohammadi slipped. Perhaps Randalls should have

known of the wet floor because a wet floor is a highly likely consequence 

of a leaking bag, but the jury has already answered the 

constructive-knowledge question in favor of Randalls. 

For these reasons, no reasonable juror could have found that 

Randalls had actual knowledge of the danger that caused Mohammadi’s 

accident. Thus, even if the jury charge had looked just the way 

Mohammadi urges, the result would have been the same—a 
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take-nothing judgment for Randalls. Because any charge error was 

harmless, the court of appeals erred by reversing the district court’s 

judgment. See TEX. R. APP. P. 44.1(a). As a result, without hearing oral 

argument, we grant the petition for review, reverse the court of appeals’ 

judgment, and reinstate the district court’s judgment. See TEX. R. APP.

P. 59.1. 

OPINION DELIVERED: April 5, 2024