Court Opinion

ID: 9853508
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-24 05:49:42.30091+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:22:50.468741
License: Public Domain

White, C.J.,
dissenting.
Once again, in a landowner’s premises liability case a majority of this court has changed the burden of proof that a *684plaintiff must satisfy before he or she is entitled to recover. Before our recent decision in Richardson v. Ames Avenue Corp., ante p. 128, 525 N.W.2d 212 (1995), the following standard defined a plaintiff’s prima facie case:
A possessor of land is subject to liability for injury caused to a business invitee by a condition on the land if (1) the possessor defendant either created the condition, knew of the condition, or by the exercise of reasonable care would have discovered the condition; (2) the defendant should have realized the condition involved an unreasonable risk of harm to a business invitee; (3) the defendant should have expected that a business invitee such as the plaintiff, either (a) would not discover or realize the danger, or (b) would fail to protect himself or herself against the danger; (4) the defendant failed to use reasonable care to protect the plaintiff invitee against the danger; and (5) the condition was a proximate cause of damage to the plaintiff.
Burns v. Veterans of Foreign Wars, 231 Neb. 844, 856, 438 N.W.2d 485, 493 (1989). See Scharmann v. Dayton Hudson Corp., ante p. 304, 526 N.W.2d 436 (1995). Subsequently, in Richardson a majority of this court expanded a plaintiff’s burden to include a duty to offer how the hazardous condition occurred and its duration. As Justice Lanphier and I pointed out in the dissent, this was not the law in this state prior to Richardson.
Lanphier and Connolly, JJ., join in this dissent.