Opinion ID: 2119572
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 7

Heading: foreseeability and duty under restatement (third) of torts

Text: In order to recover in a negligence action, a plaintiff must show a legal duty owed by the defendant to the plaintiff, a breach of such duty, causation, and damages. [5] The duty in a negligence case is to conform to the legal standard of reasonable conduct in the light of the apparent risk. [6] The question whether a legal duty exists for actionable negligence is a question of law dependent on the facts in a particular situation. [7] But it is for the fact finder to determine, on the facts of each individual case, whether or not the evidence establishes a breach of that duty. [8] A.W. first argues that LPS had a duty to protect C.B. from the danger of sexual assault, that the sexual assault of C.B. was reasonably foreseeable, and that LPS' response was inadequate to that foreseeable danger. In support of this argument, A.W. relies on the risk-utility test that we have used to determine the existence of a tort duty. [9] Under that test, we have considered (1) the magnitude of the risk, (2) the relationship of the parties, (3) the nature of the attendant risk, (4) the opportunity and ability to exercise care, (5) the foreseeability of the harm, and (6) the policy interest in the proposed solution. [10] But LPS does not dispute that it would owe C.B. a duty to protect him against any reasonably foreseeable acts of violence on its premises. [11] So A.W.'s first three arguments are really three different ways of framing the same question: Was Siems' assault of C.B. reasonably foreseeable? A.W.'s arguments with respect to foreseeability boil down to two primary contentions: first, that the LPS employees who saw Siems on the day of the assault should have foreseen the danger that he represented and, second, that the neighborhood in which Arnold Elementary School is located was sufficiently dangerous to place LPS on notice of a danger that a student could be sexually assaulted. In previous cases, because the existence of a legal duty is a question of law, we have also treated the foreseeability of a particular injury as a question of law. [12] This places us in the peculiar position, however, of deciding questions, as a matter of law, that are uniquely rooted in the facts and circumstances of a particular case and in the reasonability of the defendant's response to those facts and circumstances. For that reason, the use of foreseeability as a determinant of duty has been criticized, most pertinently in the recently adopted Restatement (Third) of Torts. [13] The Restatement (Third) explains that because the extent of foreseeable risk depends on the specific facts of the case, courts should leave such determinations to the trier of fact unless no reasonable person could differ on the matter. [14] Indeed, foreseeability determinations are particularly fact dependent and case specific, representing a [factual] judgment about a course of events ... that one often makes outside any legal context. [15] So, by incorporating foreseeability into the analysis of duty, a court transforms a factual question into a legal issue and expands the authority of judges at the expense of juries or triers of fact. [16] That is especially peculiar because decisions of foreseeability are not particularly legal, in the sense that they do not require special training, expertise, or instruction, nor do they require considering far-reaching policy concerns. [17] Rather, deciding what is reasonably foreseeable involves common sense, common experience, and application of the standards and behavioral norms of the communitymatters that have long been understood to be uniquely the province of the finder of fact. [18] In addition, we have defined a duty as an obligation, to which the law gives recognition and effect, to conform to a particular standard of conduct toward another. [19] Duty rules are meant to serve as broadly applicable guidelines for public behavior, i.e., rules of law applicable to a category of cases. [20] But foreseeability determinations are fact specific, so they are not categorically applicable, and are incapable of serving as useful behavioral guides. [21] And, as the Arizona Supreme Court explained, [r]eliance by courts on notions of `foreseeability' also may obscure the factors that actually guide courts in recognizing duties for purposes of negligence liability. [22] Instead, as the Restatement (Third) explains, an actor ordinarily has a duty to exercise reasonable care when the actor's conduct creates a risk of physical harm. [23] But, in exceptional cases, when an articulated countervailing principle or policy warrants denying or limiting liability in a particular class of cases, a court may decide that a defendant has no duty or that the ordinary duty of reasonable care requires modification. [24] A no-duty determination, then, is grounded in public policy and based upon legislative facts, not adjudicative facts arising out of the particular circumstances of the case. [25] And such ruling should be explained and justified based on articulated policies or principles that justify exempting these actors from liability or modifying the ordinary duty of reasonable care. [26] For example, the Iowa Supreme Court adopted the Restatement (Third) in Thompson v. Kaczinski [27] and, in Van Fossen v. MidAmerican Energy Co., [28] applied it to limit the duty owed by an employer of an independent contractor to a member of the household of an employee of the independent contractor. The court explained that foreseeability of the harm was not part of the analysis, but that an exception to the general duty of reasonable care was warranted, as a matter of policy, based upon an independent contractor's control of the premises where the work was to be performed and the difficulty inherent in requiring an employer to supervise each aspect of an independent contractor's often specialized work. [29] We reached a similar conclusion in Parrish v. Omaha Pub. Power Dist., [30] in which weinterestinglydiscussed and determined the legal duties of a landowner and general contractor to a subcontractor based upon the same considerations, without relying upon foreseeability. But in other cases, our law has not been so clear. As noted above, we have stated that as a general proposition, in negligence cases, the duty is always the sameto conform to the legal standard of reasonable conduct in light of the apparent risk. [31] That uncontroversial proposition coexists uneasily with the risk-utility principles set forth above, which did not always include foreseeability and were at first expressly intended to evaluate the duty owed by a landlord to a tenant. [32] Only later did we graft foreseeability onto the rubric [33] and apply it generally beyond the context of premises liability. [34] The ensuing complications are illustrated by our reasoning in Sharkey v. Board of Regents, [35] in which we relied upon foreseeability in determining a university's legal duty to protect students on its campus from criminal activity. Although invoking our risk-utility test, our decision was grounded entirely in foreseeability. And we reasoned, in the end, that because the evidence showed that violent altercations were not unknown at the location on campus where the plaintiff was attacked, the attack was foreseeable; thus, we held that the university owed a duty to its students to take reasonable steps to protect against foreseeable acts of violence on its campus and the harm that naturally flows therefrom. [36] In other words, we reasoned that because the attack at issue in that case was foreseeable, the defendant had a duty to protect against foreseeable acts of violence. Our reasoning was tautological. It is evident that the university had a landowner-invitee duty to protect against foreseeable acts even had the attack in that case not been foreseeable. While we purported to be discussing duty, we were in fact assuming the conclusion we claimed to be proving, and we were actually evaluating the sufficiency of the evidence to sustain a conclusion that the university had breached its duty to take reasonable care. Our mistake was a common one. As the Restatement notes, in a number of cases, courts have rendered judgments under the rubric of duty that are better understood as applications of the negligence standard to a particular category of recurring facts. [37] But the Restatement disapproves that practice and limits the determination of duty to articulated policy or principle, in order to facilitate more transparent explanations of the reasons for a no-duty ruling and to protect the traditional function of the jury as a fact finder. [38] Simply put, whether a duty exists is a policy decision, and a lack of foreseeable risk in a specific case may be a basis for a no-breach determination, but such a ruling is not a no-duty determination. [39] As the Wisconsin Supreme Court explained, in a negligence case, a defendant's conduct should be examined `not... in terms of whether ... there is a duty to [perform] a specific act, but rather whether the conduct satisfied the duty placed upon individuals to exercise that degree of care as would be exercised by a reasonable person under the circumstances.' [40] To summarize: Under the Restatement (Third), foreseeable risk is an element in the determination of negligence, not legal duty. In order to determine whether appropriate care was exercised, the fact finder must assess the foreseeable risk at the time of the defendant's alleged negligence. The extent of foreseeable risk depends on the specific facts of the case and cannot be usefully assessed for a category of cases; small changes in the facts may make a dramatic change in how much risk is foreseeable. Thus, courts should leave such determinations to the trier of fact unless no reasonable person could differ on the matter. [41] And if the court takes the question of negligence away from the trier of fact because reasonable minds could not differ about whether an actor exercised reasonable care (for example, because the injury was not reasonably foreseeable), then the court's decision merely reflects the one-sidedness of the facts bearing on negligence and should not be misrepresented or misunderstood as involving exemption from the ordinary duty of reasonable care. [42] We find the reasoning of the Restatement (Third), and our fellow courts that have endorsed it, to be persuasive. [43] The circumstances of this case illustrate how incorporating foreseeability into a duty analysis can confuse the issues. Here, it is not disputed that LPS owed C.B. a duty of reasonable care. The duty of instructors to supervise and protect students is well established under the Restatement (Second) of Torts, [44] the Restatement (Third) of Torts, [45] and our current case law. [46] Instead, the question is whether Siems' assault of C.B. was reasonably foreseeable. That determination involves a fact-specific inquiry into the circumstances that might have placed LPS on notice of the possibility of the assault. Stated another way, it requires us to ask what LPS employees knew, when they knew it, and whether a reasonable person would infer from those facts that there was a danger. Those are factual inquiries that should not be reframed as questions of law. Under the Restatement view, the basic analysis remains the same. The factual question is the same. But, it is properly reframed as a question of fact. LPS owed C.B. a duty of reasonable care. Did LPS, under the facts and circumstances of the case, conduct itself reasonably? Or, more precisely, was Siems' assault of C.B. reasonably foreseeable, such that LPS' duty of reasonable care required it to act to forestall that risk? Such an approach properly recognizes the role of the trier of fact and requires courts to clearly articulate the reasons, other than foreseeability, that might support duty or no-duty determinations. [47] And it correctly examines the defendant's conduct, not in terms of whether it had a duty to take particular actions, but instead in terms of whether its conduct breached its duty to exercise the care that would be exercised by a reasonable person under the circumstances. [48] We do not view our endorsement of the Restatement (Third) as a fundamental change in our law. It is better understood as rearranging the basic questions that are posed by any negligence case and making sure that each question has been put in its proper place. But it does not change those questions. To say, as we have in the past, that a defendant had no duty, under particular circumstances, to foresee a particular harm is really no different from saying that the defendant's duty to take reasonable care was not breached, under those circumstances, by its failure to foresee the unforeseeable. But placing foreseeability in the context of breach, rather than duty, properly charges the trier of fact with determining whether a particular harm was, on the facts of the case, reasonably foreseeablealthough the court reserves the right to determine that the defendant did not breach its duty of reasonable care, as a matter of law, where reasonable people could not disagree about the unforeseeability of the injury. We have often said that ``[t]he risk reasonably to be perceived defines the duty to be obeyed[,]'' [49] but that proposition should now be understood as explaining how foreseeability helps define what conduct the standard of care requires under the circumstances and whether the conduct of the alleged tort-feasor conforms to that standard. These are determinations reserved for the finder of fact. [50] And the factors of our risk-utility test, which we have employed to determine the existence of a duty, are better applied as possible considerations in determining whether an actor's conduct was negligent. [51] As the Restatement (Third) explains: A person acts negligently if the person does not exercise reasonable care under all the circumstances. Primary factors to consider in ascertaining whether the person's conduct lacks reasonable care are the foreseeable likelihood that the person's conduct will result in harm, the foreseeable severity of any harm that may ensue, and the burden of precautions to eliminate or reduce the risk of harm. [52] For the foregoing reasons, we find the clarification of the duty analysis contained in the Restatement (Third) of Torts, § 7, to be compelling, and we adopt it. [53] We expressly hold that foreseeability is not a factor to be considered by courts when making determinations of duty. [54]