Opinion ID: 1372176
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 9

Heading: The role of the court and jury in the application of this test.

Text: As recognized in Jefferson Plywood, the more difficult problem arises in the application of that test to the facts of a particular case and, in particular, in determining the proper role of the court and that of the jury in such cases. I agree that in such cases it is the duty of the court to decide, as a matter of law, whether sufficient facts have been alleged or proved by the plaintiff to entitle him to have his case submitted to the jury. My disagreement with the opinion by Peterson, J., is, perhaps, primarily a matter of emphasis and application rather than of terminology. His opinion would emphasize the statement in Jefferson Plywood, at 609, 469 P.2d at 786 (and repeated in Allen v. Shiroma/Leathers, supra , ) that:    fault, as the term is usually understood, is not associated with conduct which causes harm through the concatenation of highly unusual circumstances. If, in our appraisal of the community's conception of fault, we find that the conduct in question clearly falls outside the conception, we are charged with the duty of withdrawing the issue from the jury. This court also said in Jefferson Plywood (at 611, 469 P.2d at 787): If we could say that defendant's conduct would not be deemed blameworthy according to the community's sense of fault, we would not permit the jury to impose liability. In discussing the question of the role of the court and jury in such cases, however, this court said in Jefferson Plywood (at 609-10, 469 P.2d at 786) that: The specific question before us is, then, whether plaintiff's injury and the manner of its occurrence was so highly unusual that we can say as a matter of law that a reasonable man, making an inventory of the possibilities of harm which his conduct might produce, would not have reasonably expected the injury to occur. Stated in another way, the question is whether the circumstances are out of the range within which a jury could determine that the injury was reasonably foreseeable. And, at pp. 607-608, 469 P.2d at 785: The jury is given a wide leeway in deciding whether the conduct in question falls above or below the standard of reasonable conduct deemed to have been set by the community. The court intervenes only when it can say that the actor's conduct clearly meets the standard or clearly falls below it. Implicit in this process is the assumption that judges as well as juries know something about the kind of conduct that is deemed acceptable or not acceptable in the community and that, at least at the higher and lower ends of the continuum of that standard, the court can say that the conduct does or does not meet the standard. (Emphasis added) As also stated by O'Connell, J., specially concurring in Dewey v. A.F. Klaveness & Co., 233 Or. 515, 536, 379 P.2d 560, 570 (1963), quoting with approval from Prosser, Torts (2d ed. 1955) p. 282: In any case where there might be reasonable difference of opinion as to foreseeability of a particular risk, the reasonableness of the defendant's conduct with respect to it, or the normal character of an intervening cause, the question is for the jury, subject of course to suitable instructions from the court as to the legal conclusion to be drawn as the issue is determined either way.    This is consistent with the well established rule in Oregon that a court, in considering the sufficiency of evidence in an action at law, must submit the question to the jury unless it can affirmatively say that reasonable minds could not differ on the matter. [3]