Court Opinion

ID: 9706295
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 01:39:06.289364+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:22:21.435447
License: Public Domain

Kaplan, J.
(concurring). Concurring, I must, in contrast to the Chief Justice, express disappointment at the intimation in the next-to-last paragraph of the court’s opinion that the liability of an occupier for negligence might still be made to turn in this jurisdiction on the mere circumstance, without more, that the plaintiff had the common law status of a so called trespasser at the time of the occurrence in suit. I stated my views on the *188subject in a concurring opinion in Mounsey v. Ellard, 363 Mass. 693, 717 (1973), and need not repeat them here. I should have thought that the appearance of Pridgen v. Boston Housing Auth., 364 Mass. 696 (1974), within a year of the Mounsey decision, would have been sufficiently demonstrative of those views.1 The demonstration continues with the present case.
The Chief Justice’s concurrence, speaking of the iniquity of "abolishing all distinctions among tort plaintiffs who are invitees, licensees, or trespassers,” may conjure up in some minds the spectre of an armed robber recovering damages for injuries suffered by him in tripping over a rug while engaged in his criminal adventure. It can be predicted flatly that that would not occur if the court should adopt quite frankly the position I espouse. The robber would be denied recovery, but not for the reason that the common law called him a "trespasser”; rather it would be for good and sufficient functional reasons that appeal to common sense. To make that common law catchword, or any other such as "invitee” or "licensee,” in itself determinative, is a gateway to errors, as the history of the problem shows.

 See the reference to the Pridgen phenomenon in Mariorenzi v. Joseph DiPonte, Inc., 114 R.I. 294, 305 (1975).