Opinion ID: 1388423
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Assurance of compensation to accident victims

Text: The John R. lead opinion, supra, 48 Cal.3d 438, concluded that the general goal of compensating accident victims weighed against imposing vicarious liability for a sexual assault. The [sexual] acts here differ from the normal range of risks for which costs can be spread and insurance sought. [Citation.] The imposition of vicarious liability on school districts for the sexual torts of their employees would tend to make insurance, already a scarce resource, even harder to obtain, and could lead to the diversion of needed funds from the classroom to cover claims. ( Id., at p. 451.) The same reasoning applies equally to the present case. Imposing vicarious liability on cities for employee-committed rapes indisputably will increase the cost of insurance and will also decrease its availability. [2] Perhaps to avoid this difficulty, the majority makes an elliptical argument as to legislative intent, stating that, by not enacting governmental immunity for violent police misconduct, the Legislature has demonstrated that vicarious liability is an appropriate method for ensuring victim compensation. However, the Legislature's failure to expressly preclude liability is not a valid indicator that the legislative purpose was to allow such liability. The Legislature has provided that vicarious liability may be imposed only for a public employee's actionable misconduct in the scope ... of employment. Where, as here, the employee's intentional criminal conduct was a spontaneous personal deviation from duty and bore no relationship to his work performance, the Legislature's standard for vicarious liability has not been met. I am not persuaded that ensuring compensation for victims is a dispositive concern in any event. It is a truism to state that ensuring compensation weighs in favor of vicarious liability. The deeper the defendant's pocket, the easier the plaintiff is compensated. If ensuring compensation were the only goal, vicarious liability should apply against all employers in all cases. However, as the result in John R., supra, 48 Cal.3d 438, demonstrates, the sympathetic desire to compensate the injured is not a sufficient basis on which to impose vicarious liability. Our decisions in other areas reinforce this principle. For example, prescription drugs occasionally have grievous, even fatal, side effects upon innocent victims. We recently held, however, that a manufacturer of a defectively designed drug cannot be held strictly liable. ( Brown v. Superior Court (1988) 44 Cal.3d 1049, 1061 [245 Cal. Rptr. 412, 751 P.2d 470].) Writing for a unanimous court in Brown, Justice Mosk explained that despite occasional unfortunate consequences to sympathetic victims, the public interest in the development and availability of prescription drugs weighed against liability without fault. ( Id., at pp. 1061-1065.) Similarly, in Belair v. Riverside County Flood Control Dist. (1988) 47 Cal.3d 550, 564-565 [253 Cal. Rptr. 693, 764 P.2d 1070], we held that strict liability was not appropriate in an inverse condemnation action for property damaged by public flood control projects. We found, in effect, that the desire to compensate individual injuries was outweighed by important public need for such projects. The public has equally compelling interests in adequate law enforcement and preservation of public funds. A ruling that the public must bear the cost of all police misconduct merely because the public benefits from law enforcement is inconsistent with the spirit of Brown and Belair.