Opinion ID: 821513
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: conclusion

Text: The risk of injuries from bumping was inherent in the Rue le Dodge ride, and under our precedents defendant had no duty of ordinary care to prevent injuries from such an inherent risk of the activity. The absence of such a duty defeats plaintiff‟s cause of action for negligence as a matter of law. Plaintiff‟s “willful misconduct” cause of action, which (as described by the lower court and in plaintiff‟s briefing) rests on a duty to minimize head-on collisions, fails for the same reason.8 Finally, in light of our conclusion defendant did not act as a common carrier for reward in operating the bumper car ride, summary judgment was also proper on the cause of action for common carrier liability. 8 Whether “willful misconduct” constitutes an independent cause of action or is merely an element of various claims and defenses was not decided by the Court of Appeal, identified as an issue in the petition for review, or briefed by the parties in this court. An amicus curiae brief argues forcefully against recognition of such a separate cause of action, but we decline to address the issue in this case. 18 DISPOSITION The judgment of the Court of Appeal is reversed. WERDEGAR, J. WE CONCUR: CANTIL-SAKAUYE, C. J. BAXTER, J. CHIN, J. CORRIGAN, J. LIU, J. 19 DISSENTING OPINION BY KENNARD, J. In Knight v. Jewett (1992) 3 Cal.4th 296 (Knight), a plurality of this court introduced a radical transformation of California‟s tort law: Participants in active sports are exempt from the usual tort law standard of care — as measured by the conduct of a reasonable person in like or similar circumstances — to prevent injury to coparticipants. The only duty owed, the plurality said, is not to increase the risk of harm “inherent” in a particular sport (id. at pp. 315-316 (plur. opn. of George, J.)); whether a risk is inherent is a legal question to be decided by the judge before trial (id. at p. 313). I dissented in Knight, noting the difficulty trial judges would face in pretrial proceedings, on demurrer or on a motion for summary judgment, in discerning “which risks are inherent in a given sport” (id. at p. 337 (dis. opn. of Kennard, J.)). I perceived no good reason to abandon the traditional defense of assumption of risk, which pertains to a plaintiff‟s knowing and voluntary acceptance of the risk of injury in a particular activity. Eleven years later, in Kahn v. East Side Union High School Dist. (2003) 31 Cal.4th 990 (Kahn), a majority of this court extended the reasoning of the Knight plurality beyond sports participants by applying it to a high school swim coach who supervised and trained sports participants. I disagreed, for reasons similar to those expressed in my dissent in Knight, supra, 3 Cal.4th 296. (Kahn, supra, at pp. 1021-1025 (conc. & dis. opn. of Kennard, J.).) Since then, I have reiterated that view in two separate opinions. (Shin v. Ahn (2007) 42 Cal.4th 482, 500-502 1 (conc. & dis. opn. of Kennard, J.); Avila v. Citrus Community College Dist. (2006) 38 Cal.4th 148, 169-174 (conc. & dis. opn. of Kennard, J.) (Avila).)1 Today the majority further expands Knight‟s no-duty-for-sports rule, this time by bringing within the rule‟s ambit “recreational activities” (maj. opn., ante, at p. 1) (here, a bumper car ride in an amusement park), saddling trial judges with the unenviable task of determining the risks of harm that are inherent in a particular recreational activity.
In 2005, plaintiff took her nine-year-old son on a bumper car ride at Great America, an amusement park in Santa Clara, California; she sat next to her son, who steered the car. The ride was “multidirectional” (cars could go in all directions). No written warnings prohibited “head-on” bumping, but riders who deliberately collided head-on were told by the ride operator to stop. Plaintiff‟s car 1 Knight‟s no-duty-for-sports rule has been strongly criticized in various legal journals. (See, e.g., Note, California Supreme Court Extends Assumption of Risk to Noncontact Sports — Shin v. Ahn, 165 P.3d 581 (Cal. 2007) (2008) 121 Harv. L.Rev. 1253, 1260 [the California Legislature should “take Justice Kennard‟s advice and restore traditional principles of negligence to the fore of sports torts jurisprudence”]; Ursin & Carter, Clarifying Duty: California’s NoDuty-for-Sports Regime (2008) 45 San Diego L.Rev. 383, 440 [“the only real use of the inherent risk concept is to cause confusion”]; Comment, Looking Beyond the Name of the Game: A Framework for Analyzing Recreational Sports Injury Cases (2001) 34 U.C. Davis L.Rev. 1029, 1057 [“The Knight decision sets an unreasonable standard of care for recreational sports injury cases that violates public policy.”]; Note, Fore! American Golf Corporation v. Superior Court: The Continued Uneven Application of California’s Flawed Doctrine of Assumption of Risk (2001) 29 Western St. U. L.Rev. 125, 145-146 [“Knight‟s vague guidelines regarding duty analysis” are “a flawed conceptualization of the doctrine of assumption of risk” that have “produced uneven results.”]; Sugarman, Judges as Tort Law Un-Makers: Recent California Experience with “New” Torts (1999) 49 DePaul L.Rev. 455, 485 [expressing “disagreement with the policy judgment that recreational injuries are an appropriate place for such a „no duty‟ rule.”].) 2 was hit head-on and from the back in close succession. As plaintiff put her hand on the car‟s dashboard to brace herself, she fractured her wrist. She sued defendant Cedar Fair, L.P., the owner of the amusement park for, as relevant here, negligence. At the time of the injury, defendant owned four other amusement parks. In those parks, the bumper car rides were unidirectional (cars could only go in one direction, around an island), allowing rear-end and side collisions but minimizing the likelihood of head-on collisions. Plaintiff here asserted that had the bumper car ride at Great America been unidirectional, the head-on collision that fractured her wrist would not have occurred. Defendant successfully moved for summary judgment. The trial court ruled that plaintiff could not recover on her cause of action for negligence, because under the no-duty-for-sports rule defendant had no duty to prevent the bumper cars from colliding head-on. In a two-to-one decision the Court of Appeal reversed, holding that the no-duty-for-sports rule applies only to sports, and that a bumper car ride is not a sport. This court granted defendant‟s petition for review.
Until the 1993 plurality decision in Knight, California had in negligence cases followed the common law doctrine of assumption of risk, a defense to liability for injuries resulting from “a specific, known and appreciated risk” to which the plaintiff had voluntarily consented. (Knight, supra, 3 Cal.4th at p. 325 (dis. opn. of Kennard, J.).) The consent could be express (through a plaintiff‟s spoken or written words) or implied (inferred from the plaintiff‟s conduct). (Ibid.) The plurality in Knight proposed that, for injuries occurring during active sports, the assumption of risk doctrine be replaced with a rule that the Knight plurality called “ „primary assumption of risk‟ ” (Knight, supra, at p. 310 (plur. opn. of George, J.)) and which I have called the “no-duty-for-sports rule” (e.g., Knight, 3 supra, at p. 336 (dis. opn. of Kennard, J.)). A majority of this court later embraced the Knight rule. (See Cheong v. Antablin (1997) 16 Cal.4th 1063, 1067; Kahn, supra, 31 Cal.4th at pp. 995-996.) Common law assumption of the risk was an affirmative defense to be asserted and proved by the defendant at trial. Duty, by contrast, is a question of law to be determined by the trial court before trial, on demurrer or on a motion for summary judgment. The no-duty-for-sports rule reduces the traditional standard of care — measured by the conduct of a reasonable person in like or similar circumstances — by imposing on all those involved in sports activities (participants, coaches, and hosts of sporting events) only the duty to avoid increasing the danger beyond the risks that are “inherent” in the sport. Whether the plaintiff knowingly assumed the risk of injury no longer matters. As my dissent in Knight explained, the no-duty-for-sports rule “recast the analysis of implied assumption of risk from a subjective evaluation of what a particular plaintiff knew and appreciated about the encountered risk into a determination of the presence or absence of duty legally imposed on the defendant . . . [,] thus transforming an affirmative defense into an element of the plaintiff‟s negligence action.” (Knight, supra, 3 Cal.4th at p. 324 (dis. opn. of Kennard, J.).) Consequently, the rule “eliminate[d] altogether the „reasonable person‟ standard as the measure of duty actually owed” (id. at p. 325) by those involved in sports activities. In an action seeking damages for a personal injury sustained while playing a sport, determining which risks are inherent in that sport is a difficult task. Some sports are so new or uncommon that their typical risks may not be evident. Even for sports that are familiar and widely played, moreover, the risks of physical injury to players of that sport are likely to vary greatly depending on, for example, the participants‟ ages and genders, their levels of skill and experience, and the 4 presence or absence of protective clothing and equipment. Because of the many variables, the “inherent risk” determination is often fact-intensive and ill-suited for treatment as a question of law, which a trial court must decide without the benefit of an evidentiary hearing. The difficulties that trial courts will encounter when making these “inherent risk” determinations are greatly amplified by today‟s decision expanding the no-duty-for-sports rule to also encompass recreational activities that are not sports. The majority gives this reason for applying the no-duty-for-sports rule to recreational activities: “[A]ctive recreation, because it involves physical activity and is not essential to daily life, is particularly vulnerable to the chilling effects of potential tort liability for ordinary negligence.” (Maj. opn., ante, at p. 9.) The majority later asserts: “The primary assumption of risk doctrine helps ensure that the threat of litigation and liability does not cause such recreational activities to be abandoned or fundamentally altered in an effort to eliminate or minimize inherent risks of injury.” (Id. at p. 17.) But the majority offers no evidence for that view. Pertinent here is this comment by a major treatise on tort law: “It may be that some courts are in the process of creating a freestanding limited-duty rule, divorced from its foundation in the parties‟ expectations. The opinions suggest that the duty should be limited because of the danger of a flood of litigation, and because of a supposed policy of encouraging vigorous physical competition. Both these reasons, as distinct from the parties‟ reasonable expectations, may be doubted.” (1 Dobbs et al., The Law of Torts (2d ed. 2011), § 240, p. 868, fns. omitted.) A final point: Even if the common law assumption of risk doctrine were still in place in California (see pp. 3-4, ante), plaintiff here would not necessarily prevail in her action for personal injury. Under that doctrine, “the pertinent inquiry is not what risk is inherent in a particular sport [or recreational activity]; 5 rather, it is what risk the plaintiff consciously and voluntarily assumed.” (Avila, supra, 38 Cal.4th at p. 173 (conc. & dis. opn. of Kennard, J.).) Thus, the question here would be whether plaintiff voluntarily assumed the risk of the type of harm that ensued from her decision to ride the bumper car, “with knowledge and appreciation of that risk.” (Knight, supra, 3 Cal.4th at p. 326 (dis. opn. of Kennard, J.).) Even if plaintiff did not assume that risk, defendant may not have acted unreasonably by making the bumper car ride at Great America a multidirectional ride, and thus may not have breached its duty of care toward plaintiff. According to declarations in the appellate record, approximately 300,000 people rode on that ride in 2005, the year plaintiff was injured, and she was the only one to suffer a fracture. Based on such evidence, a jury could conclude that defendant was not negligent. Because, for the reasons given above, I agree with the Court of Appeal that the no-duty-for-sports rule should not be extended to a bumper car ride, which the Court of Appeal observed is not a sport, I would affirm its judgment reversing the trial court‟s grant of defendant‟s summary judgment motion. KENNARD, J. 6 See next page for addresses and telephone numbers for counsel who argued in Supreme Court. Name of Opinion Nalwa v. Cedar Fair, L.P. __________________________________________________________________________________ Unpublished Opinion Original Appeal Original Proceeding Review Granted XXX 196 Cal.App.4th 566 Rehearing Granted __________________________________________________________________________________ Opinion No. S195031 Date Filed: December 31, 2012 __________________________________________________________________________________ Court: Superior County: Santa Clara Judge: James P. Kleinberg __________________________________________________________________________________ Counsel: Law Offices of Ardell Johnson, Ardell Johnson; Christi Jo Elkin; Emanuel Law Group and Mark D. Rosenberg for Plaintiff and Appellant. Manning & Kass, Ellrod, Ramirez, Trester, Patrick L. Hurley, Jeffrey M. Lenkov and Stephen J. Renick for Defendant and Respondent. Duane Morris, John E. Fagan, Paul J. Killion and Jill Penwarden for California Ski Industry Association and National Ski Areas Association as Amici Curiae on behalf of Defendant and Respondent. Prindle, Amaro, Goetz, Hillyard, Barnes & Reinholt and Michael L. Amaro for Park Management Corp. doing business as Six Flags Discovery Kingdom, Magic Mountain LLC, LEGOLAND California LLC, Agua Caliente, Bally Total Fitness Corporation, 24 Hour Fitness, GNS Development Corporation doing business as Golf N‟ Stuff, Montasia LP, Butler Amusements, Inc., Christensen Amusements, Carnival Midway Attractions, Brass Ring Amusements, Inc., Davis Enterprises and Amusements, Northridge Skateland Enterprises, The Worldwide Outfitters and Guides Association, International Special Events and Recreation Association and Scooters Jungle as Amici Curiae on behalf of Defendant and Respondent. Snell & Wilmer, Mary-Christine Sungaila and Jessica E. Yates for California Chamber of Commerce as Amicus Curiae on behalf of Defendant and Respondent. David J. Ozeran as Amicus Curiae on behalf of Defendant and Respondent. Horvitz & Levy, Frederic D. Cohen and Wesley T. Shih for California Attractions and Parks Association as Amicus Curiae on behalf of Defendant and Respondent. Gordon & Rees, Don Willenburg; Cole Pedroza and Joshua C. Traver for Association of Defense Counsel of Northern California and Nevada and Association of Southern Defense Counsel as Amici Curiae on behalf of Defendant and Respondent. Counsel who argued in Supreme Court (not intended for publication with opinion): Mark D. Rosenberg Emanuel Law Group 702 Marshall Street, Suite 400 Redwood City, CA 94063 (650) 369-8900 Jeffrey M. Lenkov Manning & Kass, Ellrod, Ramirez, Trester 801 South Figueroa Street, 15th Floor Los Angeles, CA 90017 (213) 624-6900 Stephen J. Renick Manning & Kass, Ellrod, Ramirez, Trester 801 South Figueroa Street, 15th Floor Los Angeles, CA 90017 (213) 624-6900