Court Opinion

ID: 9569561
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-21 20:15:01.749126+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T12:03:28.141361
License: Public Domain

Prager, J.,
dissenting. I respectfully dissent as to syllabi 2, 3, and 4 and corresponding portions of the opinion. This case involves the question of the duty owed by a land occupier to a licensee. I would hold that, as to invitees and licensees, this court in this case should abolish the status classification system and establish a rule that the standard of a land occupier’s duty to all persons who come upon the premises with his consent is ordinary care under the circumstances. This position was the basis for my dissenting opinion in Gerchberg v. Loney, 223 Kan. 446, 576 P.2d 593 (1978). Since Gerchberg was decided, the Supreme Judicial Court of Maine in Poulin v. Colby College, 402 A.2d 846 (Me. 1979), has abolished the distinction between licensees and invitees, holding that a landowner owes the same duty of reasonable care under the circumstances to all persons lawfully on the land with the permission of the occupier.
After Gerchberg was decided, that decision was reviewed in Survey of Kansas Law: Torts, by Professor William Edward Westerbeke in 27 Kan. L. Rev. 321, 338-40 (1979), and also in Torts: Landowner Liability and Attractive Nuisance — Kansas *511Rejects the Modem Trend, an article by Eugenia K. Godfrey in 18 Washburn L. J. 190 (1978). In both of these law review articles, the legal doctrine which distinguishes between licensees and invitees is criticized as being anachronistic and basically unjust because it permits a landowner to evade a fundamental legal duty which should be placed upon all citizens to exercise ordinary care under the circumstances to prevent injury to other persons.
In the majority opinion, Justice Fromme discusses in some depth the analysis of Professor Carl S. Hawkins in Premises Liability After Repudiation of the Status Categories: Allocation of Judge and Jury Functions, Utah L. Rev. 15 (1981). In this article Professor Hawkins reviews the development of the law in those states which have repudiated the licensee-invitee distinction, He correctly points out that there has not been an abdication by the courts of their responsibility to prevent groundless cases from going to the jury and that this has been accomplished by the simple device of ruling in clear cases that the defendant was not negligent as a matter of law under the circumstances. This is a technique which is used quite frequently in general negligence practice. The point of Professor Hawkins is not that there is no justification for the abolition of the status classifications. His point is that the abolition of the classifications has not resulted in uncontrolled findings of liability on the part of property owners, because, in applying the reasonable man standard, the courts have applied the usual protections and safeguards customarily applied in other types of negligence cases.
The manifest injustice of the distinction between invitees and licensees is well illustrated by the present case. If the plaintiff, Ella May Britt, had been on the premises attending a lecture sponsored by the junior college on another evening and had been injured as the result of the negligence of its employee, she could have recovered for those personal injuries. Her trouble is that she went to the auditorium on the wrong night. Although she may have been injured in the same way by the negligence of an employee of the junior college, the majority have held that she is completely without remedy because she did not have the status of an invitee, since the program was not being sponsored by the junior college. The inherent injustice of the invitee-licensee differentiation becomes quite obvious in this case. For these reasons, I respectfully dissent.
Herd, J., joins the foregoing dissenting opinion.