Opinion ID: 1218909
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 6

Heading: the city's assumption-of-risk defense

Text: Thomas v. Holliday teaches that, as a tort defense concept, risk assumption is divisible into three categories  express assumption of risk, [23] implied primary assumption of risk [24] and implied secondary assumption of risk. [25] Whether the plaintiff's consent to injury is express or implied, the result is the same  the defendant is relieved of a legal duty to the plaintiff and cannot be held answerable for negligence. [26] Cases falling into each of these three categories rest on the risk content in the activity pursued by the plaintiff. The entrant's risk assumption is at times mistakenly used to state that the occupier bears no liability for open and obvious hazards on the land. This manner of explaining the law confuses risk assumption with nonliability. To avoid the resulting conceptual mess, it would be far more correct to state that the landowner is generally not liable to entrants for open and obvious defects instead of saying that the entrant assumes all the risk of open and obvious hazards. [27] Because in an assumption-of-risk context there is always a suggestion that the plaintiff has expressly or impliedly consented to the harm by engaging voluntarily in an activity commonly associated with danger, the assumption defense has no place in municipal liability for unsafe streets unless the pedestrian be shown to have entered some secured area visibly blocked from public use. There is no unqualified duty on the part of a pedestrian to avoid unguarded, open public ways which may be dangerous. [28] A person using a public way for the purpose for which it was designed  i.e., walking  cannot be regarded as engaged in a activity commonly or inherently associated with risk. [29] For risk assumption to apply in the use of unsafe streets the element of danger must be drawn from some posted warning of danger. Had Byford entered an alley that was either blocked off or marked off limits to pedestrians, or had he stepped into a place that was secured by railings or some other means, the assumption-of-risk defense could be invocable. Walking upon designated public ways may not be equated to skiing, skating, engaging in pugilistic contests or to some like hazardous activity. Lastly, the element of choice or freedom of action, which is essential to invoking an implied secondary assumption of risk, [30] is never present when a pedestrian traverses an unguarded, open public way. Consideration of all these notions combine to place this case beyond the legal limit of risk-assumption defense. An unguarded, though open and obvious danger, is not per se excluded from the range of municipal accountability for negligence. Each claim must stand on its own facts. If in a case like this a city were allowed to interpose an assumption-of-risk defense, normal pedestrian use of open, unguarded public ways would qualify in law as a hazardous activity associated with some implied danger. The obvious absurdity of that premise mandates its out-of-hand rejection.