Court Opinion

ID: 9475200
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 05:19:43.247456+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:44:33.740154
License: Public Domain

DAVID A. NELSON, Circuit Judge,
concurring.
I concur in the judgment of the court, but for a reason that differs from the court’s and that would permit the defenses of contributory negligence and assumption of the risk to be considered by the jury if the jury believes the testimony of plaintiff Carl Wren’s employer that Mr. Wren had been instructed to stay out of the building where his injury occurred.
Mr. Wren had broken his leg in several places a month before the fall for which he is suing here. He was wearing a cast that extended from toe to mid-thigh, and he was *328able to navigate only on crutches. He had prevailed on his employer to let him return to work while the cast was still on his leg, but the employer testified that Mr. Wren had been specifically told that although he could deliver materials to the job site (which he was able to do without getting out of his truck, the unloading being done by laborers on the site), he was not to go into the building. The employer thought there were “too many hazards [for anybody in Carl’s shape at that time] in a new job site.”
The employer testified that the instructions not to enter the building preceded Mr. Wren’s fall into the elevator shaft. Mr. Wren himself, however, testified that this conversation took place after the fall, at a time when he was talking to his employer about returning to work a second time.
We have no way of knowing which version the jury might have considered more credible. The verdict in favor of defendant Sullivan Electric was a general verdict, not tested by special interrogatories. It is possible that the jury accepted Mr. Wren’s version of the facts but returned a verdict against him anyway on the theory that he should not have gone where he could not see. It is also possible that the jury believed Mr. Wren had been told to stay out of the building and that he would not have been injured if he had simply done as he was told.
Tennessee law would allow a verdict for the defendant under the latter hypothesis, I think, but not under the former.
The general rule in Tennessee, as the court’s opinion indicates, is that contributory negligence or assumption of the risk of injury by the plaintiff will defeat recovery against a negligent defendant whether or not the defendant’s negligence arises from a violation of a statute or ordinance and thus is “negligence per se.” To this general rule there is an exception, as the court’s opinion also indicates: the Tennessee courts have repeatedly held that an employer or safety official whose violation of a worker safety statute results in injury to an employee may not escape liability because of the employee’s contributory negligence or assumption of the risk in going on a job site he knows to be hazardous. American Zinc Co. v. Graham, 132 Tenn. 586, 179 S.W. 138 (1915); Tennessee Eastman Corp. v. Newman, 22 Tenn.App. 270, 121 S.W.2d 130 (1938); Holliston Mills v. McGriffin, 177 Tenn. 1, 145 S.W.2d 1 (1940); State, for the Use of Lay v. Clymer, 182 S.W.2d 425 (Tenn.App.1943).
The scope of the exception to the general rule must, I think, be considered a function of the reason that led the Tennessee courts to carve out the exception in the first place. In each of the cases cited the injured employee was in a hazardous place because his employment required it; in none was he there despite his employer’s having forbidden it. Thus the presence of the American Zinc plaintiff in the employer’s hazardous mine shaft was the result of “physical necessity ... making it essential that [he] should have work in order to secure the means of sustenance.” 179 S.W. at 139. The Tennessee Eastman plaintiff's exposure to the hazards of soda ash dust, similarly, resulted from the fact that “the employee was required to perform his duties in the dust storm.” 121 S.W.2d at 132. (Emphasis supplied.) The Holliston Mills plaintiff was exposed to injurious fumes because the desk at which he did clerical work for his employer was located within 20 feet of the room where the employer was producing the fumes. 145 S.W.2d at 3. And the mine explosion in which the Clymer plaintiffs were injured or killed occurred in the particular mine in which they were paid to work. 182 S.W.2d at 428.
As indicated in the passage from American Zinc quoted in this court’s opinion, the Tennessee courts are not willing to hold that an employee assumes the risk of injury when economic necessity compels him to enter a site that he knows is hazardous, but that also happens to be the place where he earns his daily bread. It scarcely follows from this, however, that an employee cannot be found to have assumed the risk of injury when he enters a hazardous site from which his employer has directed him to stay away. Cessante ratione, cessat ipsa lex; if Tennessee’s general rule retains any *329meaning at all, I fail to see why it should not be applied in such a situation.
There is nothing to the contrary in Teal v. E.l. DuPont de Nemours and Co., 728 F.2d 799 (6th Cir.1984), which, like Clymer, was an action against someone other than the plaintiffs own employer. Like the plaintiffs in Clymer, Mr. Teal was where he was because his employer wanted him to be there. Teal’s employer, as far as the opinion discloses, had never told him to stay out of the “bailer pit” in which he was injured, and it seems fair to assume that the exigencies of his employment required him to be there.
The question presented in the case at bar is whether the Tennessee courts would say that an employee may be found to have assumed the risk of injury on a hazardous job site when, knowing of the danger in doing so, he enters the site against orders. Seeing no reason why Tennessee could not be expected to answer that question in accordance with its general rule, I would permit the trial court to instruct the jury that Mr. Wren may be found to have assumed the risk of injury if the jury believes the testimony of his employer, but not otherwise.