Opinion ID: 1165377
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Obstacles in Oregon negligence law.

Text: Like other common law jurisdictions, Oregon has few precedents for liability for negligent injury to solely psychic interests or for harm resulting from an injury to another person. Although defendant's motion to dismiss characterized plaintiff's complaint as pleading a cause of action for loss of parental consortium, plaintiff himself describes it simply as an action in negligence. Viewed simply as a common law negligence case, without a special statutory basis, plaintiff's action must escape each of these two obstacles. If there are few causes of action for psychic or emotional harm as such, the reason is not found in objections to monetary damages for harm of that nature. The reason may be found by focusing, not on the nature of the plaintiff's loss, but on the source and scope of the defendant's liability. This court has recognized common law liability for psychic injury alone when defendant's conduct was either intentional or equivalently reckless of another's feelings in a responsible relationship, [16] or when it infringed some legally protected interest apart from causing the claimed distress, even when only negligently. [17] The court has found infringements of legal rights in an invasion of privacy, Hinish, supra n. 4, in the negligent removal of the remains of a deceased spouse, Hovis, supra n. 17, and in the negligent delivery of a passport that allowed plaintiff's child to be taken from this country, McEvoy, supra n. 17. But we have not yet extended liability for ordinary negligence to solely psychic or emotional injury not accompanying any actual or threatened physical harm or any injury to another legally protected interest. [18] Under these principles, to use a simple illustration, a child might well have a cause of action for solely emotional distress if someone, in order to cause that distress, injured not the child's parents but a favorite family pet. Cf. Fredeen v. Stride, supra n. 17. Arguably, also, the child has rights in the parental relationship sufficiently like those asserted in Hovis and McEvoy to support a similar recovery for a psychic injury inflicted even by negligence. The nature of the harm asserted here therefore does not alone defeat plaintiff's claim. There remains, however, the objection that the loss he asserts, though it is an injury to himself, arises solely as a consequence of an injury to another person. We have recently reaffirmed the denial of damages to one person economically injured in consequence of a negligent injury to another person. Ore-Ida Foods v. Indian Head, 290 Or. 909, 627 P.2d 469 (1981). In his opinion for the Court, Justice Peterson reviewed, without endorsing, the various ways in which this denial of a negligence claim for consequential injuries has been explained. These include such propositions as that the defendant's negligence, though the cause of plaintiff's loss, was not the proximate cause, a concept no longer employed in our cases; [19] or that the consequence is too remote, which generally means the same thing; or that it is not foreseeable, which is a question of fact and will often be untrue; or that claims by consequentially injured plaintiffs would burden the courts, a reason we have rejected above; or that the negligent defendant's duty to avoid unreasonable risk of harm to the person initially injured does not extend to such plaintiffs, which merely states the result. [20] 290 Or. at 916-17, 627 P.2d 469. As the dissenting opinion in the Court of Appeals pointed out, this court has said that generally the scope of the duty to avoid negligent injury to another is governed by the foreseeable risk of harm, and on appropriate evidence a factfinder might well find it within a physician's or hospital's knowledge or reasonable expectation that a 25-year-old female patient has one or more young children who risk immediate and long-range psychic harm if she is incapacitated. [21] Nonetheless, all these propositions express a rule that negligence alone, as a reason to shift the burden of a resulting loss, has not been deemed so grievous as to hold the negligent actor liable beyond the immediate victim's injury to others who suffer a loss only in consequence of that injury. The denial of recovery for a third person's consequential economic loss in Ore-Ida Foods, supra, meets the present plaintiff's claim for his alleged loss of his mother's support and his own future obligation to support his disabled mother. The question remains whether the law recognizes a wider range of liability for foreseeable noneconomic consequences to others beyond a physically injured person. We note that plaintiff, and those courts that have allowed claims like his, do not assert such liability for the foreseeable psychic harm to any person who is in a close emotional relationship to the injured person. They speak only of the relationship between parents and minor children. See Ferriter v. Daniel O'Connell's Sons, supra, 413 N.E.2d at 696; Weitl v. Moes, supra, 311 N.W.2d at 270. But see Berger v. Weber, supra n. 1, 303 N.W.2d at 427 (reserving decision on whether action is limited to minor children with severely injured parents). This has its own difficulties in a society whose practices and common assumptions about such relationships are rapidly changing. Would the parentage that entitled a child to claim a psychic injury follow from biology, or cohabitation, or only married cohabitation, or solely from legal parentage by birth or adoption? [22] In any event, to limit recovery to minor children means that the premise for the asserted cause of action is not found in general negligence theory applied to indirect but foreseeable psychic injury as such, because this can occur in many other close relationships. Rather, as shown by the cases discussed in Part II, the premise must be sought in those parts of the state's law that specifically deal with injuries to family relationships.