Court Opinion

ID: 9774852
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-29 18:35:36.338364+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:32:16.914985
License: Public Domain

George Rose Smith, Justice, dissenting. I would reverse as to Jordan, because as I interpret the testimony Jordan had no reason to foresee the possibility that Mrs. Womack’s purse contained a pistol that might go off upon the purse’s being thrown across the room. Yet the majority opinion, after saying that “even if we assume that Jordan was unaware that Womack had a pistol in her purse,” still imposes liability, simply because the thrown purse might have hit someone in the head or have caused injury by breaking glasses on a table. Such reasoning is properly criticized by Harper and James in their Law of Torts, § 20.5 (1956): “Courts and writers have from time to time taken the position that if defendants should anticipate that certain conduct is fraught with unreasonable probability of some harms to somebody, then the duty to refrain from that conduct is owed to anyone who may in fact be hurt by it. As we have seen, this was the view taken in the dissenting opinion of Judge Andrews in Palsgraf v. Long Island Railroad Co.” What the present majority opinion really says is that if Jordan could foresee some danger, then he is liable for any injury that might actually occur, no matter how unforeseeable. It would make no difference if the purse contained a pistol, a vial of poison gas, or an angry rattlesnake. Prosser points out why that view is wrong: “It is here at least that the line must of necessity be drawn to terminate the defendant’s responsibility. The courts have exhibited a more or less instinctive feeling that it would be unfair to hold him liable. The virtually unanimous agreement that the liability must be limited to cover only those intervening causes which lie within the scope of the foreseeable risk, or have at least some reasonable connection with it, is based upon a recognition of the fact that the independent causes which may intervene to change the situation created by the defendant are infinite, and that as a practical matter responsibility simply cannot be carried to such lengths.” Prosser on Torts, § 44 (4th ed., 1971). I would hold that the discharge of the pistol was an intervening cause for which Jordan is not liable.