Court Opinion

ID: 9529089
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 03:47:25.617988+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T13:27:40.008257
License: Public Domain

Quirico, J.
(concurring). I concur with the result reached by the court in this case. In doing so I avail myself of the first opportunity to express my opinion that the existence of interspousal liability, and the extent or limits thereof, should in no way be dependent on, or limited by, the existence of insurance covering the actions of the defendant spouse.
In Sorensen v. Sorensen, 369 Mass. 350, 352-353 (1975), this court said: “[W]e hold that in a tort action for negligence (a) arising from an automobile accident and (b) brought by an unemancipated minor child against a parent, the doctrine of parental immunity is abrogated to the extent of the parent’s automobile liability insurance coverage” (emphasis supplied). In Lewis v. Lewis, 370 Mass. 619, 629-630 & n.4 (1976), abrogating interspousal immunity as “to claims arising out of motor vehicle accidents,” this court said: “In Sorensen v. Sorensen, 369 Mass. 350, 352-353 (1975), in abrogating parental immunity in automobile tort cases we limited the liability to the extent of the parent’s automobile liability insurance coverage. In the present case there is nothing in the record concerning the availability or the amount of the defendant’s liability insurance, and we do not refer to insurance as a limiting factor in our holding. We do not interpret the logic (as opposed to the precise holding) of Sorensen as turning on the availability of insurance in each case, and we decline to limit liability in interspousal tort actions in such a fashion.”
The opinion in the case decided today does not depend on whether the defendant husband’s motor vehicle in which the plaintiff was riding when she was injured was *363insured. That is consistent with the court’s statement quoted above from the footnote in the Lewis case to the effect that “we decline to limit liability in interspousal tort actions” to situations covered by insurance. The same footnote contained a limited reference to the holding in the Sorensen case which abrogated parental immunity in automobile tort actions “to the extent of the parent’s automobile liability insurance coverage,” but it stopped short of disavowing the positing of liability in such cases on the existence of such coverage. I would now expressly disavow that part of the Sorensen holding which makes the existence of such insurance coverage a condition precedent to parental liability and limits recovery to the amount of such coverage. I believe that such an express disavowal is necessary so that we may henceforth treat the important subject of familial liability on its own merits without regard to extraneous factors such as the existence or absence of insurance in a particular case. Unless we do this we may next find ourselves faced with requests to abrogate the doctrine of governmental immunity or the remaining vestiges of the doctrine of charitable immunity on the claimed basis of the existence of insurance coverage in each particular case.