Opinion ID: 895009
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: The Duty to Independent Contractors and Parker

Text: The court of appeals held the defendants still owed Moritz a duty to warn or make the ramp safe because this Court abolished all no-duty arguments in 1976 in Parker v. Highland Park. [17] But Parker does not go that far, as we explained more than 20 years ago in Dixon v. Van Waters and Rogers. [18] In Parker, a landlord mis-set a timing device that turned on the lights in an enclosed stairway of an apartment building, darkening the tenants' only way down. [19] In upholding a jury verdict in a visitor's favor, we expressly abolish[ed] the so-called no-duty concept in this case and ordered that [t]he reasonableness of an actor's conduct under the circumstances will be determined under principles of contributory negligence. [20] But Parker abolished a certain kind of no-duty defense, not all duty questions whatsoever. The question in Parker was not whether the defendant owed the plaintiff a duty; the landlord unquestionably had a duty to provide second-floor renters some way down besides jumping. The question instead, as we explained in 1984 in Dixon, was whether the plaintiff had to prove she had no knowledge of the stairway's darkness as part of her case-in-chief: The term no-duty, as used in Parker, referred to the oddity that had uniquely developed in Texas to confuse negligence law. It meant that a plaintiff had the burden to negate his own knowledge and his own appreciation of a danger. The rule that the plaintiff does not have the burden to obtain findings that disprove his own fault does not, however, mean that a plaintiff is excused from proving the defendant had a duty and breached it. A plaintiff does not have the burden to prove and obtain findings that he lacked knowledge and appreciation of a danger; he must, however, prove the defendant had a duty and breached it. [21] Like any other negligence action, a defendant in a premises case is liable only to the extent it owes the plaintiff a legal duty. [22] Whether such a duty exists is a question of law for the court; [23] it is not for the jury to decide under comparative negligence or anything else. If (for example) a defendant neither owns nor occupies the premises, a jury cannot impose a duty anyway on the theory that Parker abolished all no-duty defenses. Every court that has analyzed Parker and Dixon together has come to this same conclusion  including courts of appeals for the First, [24] Seventh, [25] Eighth, [26] and Fourteenth Districts, [27] and the federal Fifth Circuit. [28] We do not, as the overwrought dissent suggests, overrule Parker, comparative negligence, or principles of premises liability law that govern virtually all other jurisdictions. We acknowledge that GE had a duty to exercise care with respect to matters over which it exercised control, but it did not control where or how Moritz chose to secure his load. Unlike other invitees, independent contractors are hired for special projects that often entail special expertise, [29] and can be expected to use whatever equipment or precautions are necessary so long as a hazard is not concealed. If Moritz wanted to use bungee cords and lean over backwards, that was his business; but he could not require GE to keep him safe no matter how he chose to do his own work. Nor has it been settled in our state for more than thirty years that someone besides Moritz's employer must owe him a duty here. We expressly rejected any such duty forty years ago. Before then, we had held in the 1920s in Galveston-Houston Elec. Ry. Co. v. Reinle that a premises owner had to warn employees of an independent contractor of a hazard even if the employee already knew about it. [30] But in 1967, Chief Justice Calvert writing for this Court expressly overruled that decision: Reinle must either be followed or overruled. With due respect for the rule of stare decisis, we are convinced that the rule of Reinle imposes an unfair and, indeed, an intolerable burden on an owner or occupier of land who employs an independent contractor to do work or to perform services on the premises. While an owner owes a duty to employees of an independent contractor to take reasonable precautions to protect them from hidden dangers on the premises or to warn them thereof, an adequate warning to or full knowledge by the independent contractor of the dangers should and will be held to discharge the landowner's alternative duty to warn the employees. [31] This rule, repeated frequently and as recently as 2007, has never been abrogated  impliedly or otherwise  as the dissent asserts. Nor is analysis of a defendant's duty no different from analysis of a plaintiff's negligence. It is true that when a hazard is obvious, the plaintiff will usually know about it. But that does not mean the plaintiff is negligent, as some like Ms. Parker must encounter a hazard because they have no other choice. [32] By contrast, duty depends on a legal analysis balancing a number of factors, including the risk, foreseeability, and likelihood of injury, and the consequences of placing the burden on the defendant. [33] Those factors are not necessarily the same for shoppers, deliverymen, or independent contractors who perform their own work with their own equipment in their own way. It was because of those factors that we adopted the rule limiting landowner liability to independent contractors in 1967; the dissent addresses none of them in urging that we change that duty today, instead simply pointing to Parker, a case that did not involve independent contractors at all. The distinctions drawn in the law may not always be easy, but we decline the dissent's suggestion that we simplify them by mashing them all together.