Opinion ID: 1698910
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 9

Heading: duty of motorists

Text: The landowner here asserts that if this Court recognizes any duty on his part, landowners will in essence be delegated the role of insurers for motorists using their adjoining roadways and that imposing this duty will relieve motorists of their established duty of care. However, as has been noted quite often, the imposition of a duty is nothing more than a threshold requirement that if satisfied, merely opens the courthouse doors. McCain, 593 So.2d at 502. Once this duty is satisfied, an injured party must still prove the remaining elements of a negligence claim, including the much more specific proximate cause requirement. See Sprecher, 178 Cal.Rptr. 783, 636 P.2d at 1130 (Richardson, J., concurring) (agreeing to impose duty of care on landowners, yet recognizing that it would be exceedingly difficult to imagine how defendant could have corrected condition and therefore predicting defendant would most likely not be found liable). Hence, the burden remains with a claimant to establish the elements of a negligence claim against a defendant-landowner before being entitled to recover damages. Moreover, the imposition of a duty of care upon landowners will not relieve motorists of a duty because in Florida, even if a landowner breaches her duty of care, a plaintiff's award will be offset by the percentage of fault attributable to him in comparison to the fault of others, including the landowner. See Hoffman v. Jones, 280 So.2d 431 (Fla.1973). As pointedly noted by Judge Schwartz in Evans, jurors perform such tasks daily in tort cases. Evans, 391 So.2d at 234 (Schwartz, J., dissenting) (noting that the determination of whether reasonable care has been exercised in a specific situation is just what juries do and what, under our system, they are for).