Court Opinion

ID: 9725836
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 12:15:06.776144+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:25:20.508929
License: Public Domain

POCHÉ, J.—I dissent.
On the question of what constitutes a close relationship, the court today draws a bright line distinction between those persons formally married and those not. In particular, a person living with another for three years without benefit of clergy is precluded as a matter of law from recovering for the emotional distress suffered from witnessing the killing of her “de facto” spouse.
Foreseeability of the risk is the issue. The formula for resolution given by the California Supreme Court in Dillon v. Legg (1968) 68 Cal.2d 728 [69 Cal.Rptr. 72, 441 P.2d 912, 29 A.L.R.3d 1316] contains only three elements, two of which the plaintiff undeniably satisfies because her emotional shock resulted from actually observing the fatal accident. Factor three is the only concern: whether the plaintiff and the victim were “closely related, as contrasted with the absence of any relationship or the presence of only a distant relationship.” The court affirms the judgment of dismissal following the sustaining of a general demurrer because it finds no ‘family relationship” (italics added) between plaintiff and decedent. In effect the third guideline has been rewritten to require a formal marriage relationship. We are told that unchurched male/female relationships cannot be close and that the tortfeasor could *559not foresee that his victim would have a close relationship with a person to whom she was not formally married.
Giving full credit to the rarified air at the appellate level the conclusion reached here today is nevertheless astonishing: my majority colleagues have determined the incidence of cohabitation without benefit of clergy in contemporary California society to be so rare that it can be characterized as “unexpected and remote.”1
I do not believe that this no marriage-no recovery rule is what the California Supreme Court meant when it ordered the courts of this state to carefully analyze on a case-by-case basis what the ordinary person should have foreseen. (Dillon v. Legg, supra.)
This insistence on adherence to an older morality as the key to the courtroom was discarded shortly after the close of the Spanish Inquisition and is clearly not the law of this state. (Dillon v. Legg, supra; Marvin v. Marvin, supra, 18 Cal.3d 660; Mobaldi v. Regents of University of California (1976) 55 Cal.App.3d 573 [127 Cal.Rptr. 720].)2
I would reverse the judgment to allow a jury to determine whether and to what extent emotional trauma occurred.
Appellant’s petition for a hearing by the Supreme Court was denied November 19, 1980. Bird, C. J., and Newman, J., were of the opinion that the petition should be granted.

 For evidence to the contrary which at least precludes the judicial notice the majority takes see footnote 1 in Marvin v. Marvin (1976) 18 Cal.3d 660, 665 [134 Cal.Rptr. 815, 557 P.2d 106]: ‘“The 1970 census figures indicate that today perhaps eight times as many couples are living together without being married as cohabited ten years ago.’ (Comment, In re Cary: A Judicial Recognition of Illicit Cohabitation (1974) 25 Hastings L.J. 1226.)”

 Mobaldi is not distinguishable, as the majority opinion suggests, on the basis that the doctor there was aware of the relationship. Justice Thompson’s opinion so recognizes in that he refers to this as merely a buttress to the extensively developed foreseeability rationale. (Id., at P. 582.) The point is driven home elsewhere in the opinion: “‘[Reasonable foreseeability does not turn on whether the particular [defendant] would have in actuality foreseen the exact accident or loss; it contemplates that courts, on a case-to-case basis, analyzing all the circumstances, will decide what the ordinary man under such circumstances should reasonably have foreseen.’” (Id, at P. 581.)