Court Opinion

ID: 9561908
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-21 18:18:30.065098+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:13:24.230325
License: Public Domain

JEFFERSON, J.*
I concur in part and dissent in part.
I agree with the majority’s result that the judgment should be reversed because of the prejudicial error in admitting evidence of decedent’s *751intoxication and of his failure to use available safety devices. Otherwise, I part company with the majority’s views.
The majority takes the position that, since Li v. Yellow Cab Co. (1975) 13 Cal.3d 804 [119 Cal.Rptr. 858, 532 P.2d 1226, 78 A.L.R.3d 393], adopted the doctrine of comparative negligence in tort actions founded on negligence, principles of justice, fairness and equity dictate an extension of comparative principles to tort actions founded on strict liability, introduced in Greenman v. Yuba Power Products, Inc. (1963) 59 Cal.2d 57 [27 Cal.Rptr. 697, 377 P.2d 897, 13 A.L.R.3d 1049]. The majority, however, does not consider it significant that it is unable to determine what labels should be given to the new comparative principles—whether the new doctrine should be known as comparative fault, equitable apportionment of loss, or equitable allocation of loss. This inability to give the new doctrine an appropriate label is some indication of the shaky ground upon which the majority has decided to tread.
The majority rejects what I consider to be a sound criticism of its holding—that it is illogical and illusory to compare elements or factors that are not reasonably subject to comparison. The majority states that it is convinced that jurors will be able to compare the noncomparables— plaintiff’s negligence with defendant’s strict liability for a defective product—and still reach a fair apportionment of liability.
I consider the majority conclusion a case of wishful thinking and an application of an impractical, ivory-tower approach. The majority’s assumption that a jury is capable of making a fair apportionment between a plaintiff’s negligent conduct and a defendant’s defective product is no more logical or convincing than if a jury were to be instructed that it should add a quart of milk (representing plaintiff’s negligence) and a metal bar three feet in length (representing defendant’s strict liability for a defective product), and that the two added together equal 100 percent—the total fault for plaintiff’s injuries; that plaintiff’s quart of milk is then to be assigned its percentage of the 100 percent total and defendant’s metal bar is to be assigned the remaining percentage of the total. Either the jury or the trial judge will then subtract from the total amount of plaintiff’s damages an amount equal to the percentage of total fault allocated to plaintiff.
What the majority envisions as a fair apportionment of liability to be undertaken by the jury will constitute nothing more than an unfair reduction in the plaintiff’s total damages suffered, resulting from a jury *752process that necessarily is predicated on speculation, conjecture and guesswork. Because the legal concept of negligence is so utterly different from the legal concept of a product defective by reason of manufacture or design, a plaintiff’s negligence is no more capable of being rationally compared with a defendant’s defective product to determine what percentage each contributes to plaintiff’s total damages than is the quart of milk with the metal bar—posed in the above illustration.
The majority sets forth an example of how a trial judge might instruct a juiy, borrowing from a form, of special verdict, set forth under rule 49(a), Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, and tailored to the maritime doctrine of strict liability for unseaworthiness. The suggested instruction only emphasizes the futility in seeking to find logic and fairness in comparing noncomparables. The suggested instruction does nothing more than tell the juiy to do what I have posed heretofore, namely, to consider that a quart of milk and a metal bar equal 100 percent of fault and then decide what percentage of 100 percent is represented by each item.
There is simply no reasonable or logical formula or standard that can be given to the juiy to guide it in considering a defendant’s defective product and a plaintiff’s negligence as constituting 100 percent of fault for plaintiff’s injuries and then deciding what percentage of this 100 percent is caused by each of the two noncomparables—plaintiff’s negligence on the one hand and defendant’s defective product on the other. There is no doubt that q juiy, when so instructed, can, and will, assess a plaintiff’s negligence at some percentage between zero and 100 percent.. But the percentage assessed will represent nothing more substantial or reasonable than that which results from the application of the jurors’ instincts, speculations, conjectures and guesses.
I am persuaded that the juiy’s task under the majority’s holding does not, and cannot, produce justice, equity, or any fair apportionment of fault or loss. The defendant’s liability for a defective product placed in the stream of commerce should not be subject to diminution and dilution by the speculative verdict of a juiy in diminishing a plaintiff’s recoveiy of the total damages suffered from a defective product, pursuant to a trial judge’s instruction that noncomparable factors must be compared to reduce the plaintiff’s recovery from the total damages he has suffered to something less than the total.
*753A consideration of the instructions likely to be given to the jury under the majority’s holding will reveal the merit and substantiality of the objections to the majority’s views. Thus, a jury may, or may not, receive an instruction defining a “defect” in a product or a “defective” product. (See Barker v. Lull Engineering Co. (1978) ante, p. 413 [143 Cal.Rptr. 225, 573 P.2d 443].) The definition of negligence, usually given to a jury, is found in BAJI instruction No. 3.10.1 We can assume that, in substance, the jury will be told that if it finds that defendant’s product was defective in manufacture or design and that such defective product was a proximate cause of plaintiff’s injuries, and that if it also finds that plaintiff was negligent and that such negligence was also a proximate cause of plaintiff’s injuries, the two factors are to be considered as constituting 100 percent of fault (assuming there are no other proximate causes) for plaintiff’s injuries. The jury will then be told to determine what percentage each of these factors contributes to reach the 100 percent total.
Again, an instruction to the jury might be in the form of a revision of BAJI instruction No. 3.50 (1975 rev.),2 reading in essence as follows: “Contributory fault is negligence on the part of plaintiff which, combined with the defective product of defendant, contributes as a proximate cause in bringing about the injury. Contributory fault, if any, on the part of the plaintiff, does not bar a recovery by the plaintiff against the defendant but the total amount of plaintiff’s damages to which he would otherwise be entitled by reason of the injuries suffered from defendant’s defective product shall be reduced in proportion to the *754amount of fault—represented by his negligence—that is attributed to him, contrasted with the percentage of fault—represented by defendant’s defective product—that is attributable to defendant.”
But the missing element in this equation is the fact that there is no formula, no standard—other than what may be concocted in the jurors’ minds—to guide the jury in equating plaintiff’s negligence with defendant’s defective product to make the two equal 100 percent of fault and determine the respective contributions as a definitive percentage of this total fault.
This court had occasion recently to set forth a two-pronged test for determining the existence of a product made defective by virtue of its design. The court held that a product is “defective in design either (1) if the product has failed to perform as safely as an ordinary consumer would expect when used in an intended or reasonably foreseeable manner, or (2) if, in light of [certain] relevant factors . . ., the benefits of the challenged design do not outweigh the risk of danger inherent in such design.” (Barker, supra, ante, pp. 413,418.) The Barker court then made the cogent observation that “this test reflects our continued adherence to the principle that, in a product liability action, the trier of fact must focus on the product, not on the manufacturer’s conduct, and that the plaintiff need not prove that the manufacturer acted unreasonably or negligently in order to prevail in such an action.” (Ibid.) (Italics in original.)
The majority’s decision herein will require the jury, on the one hand, to follow Barker and focus on the manufacturer’s product—disregarding all questions of whether the manufacturer acted unreasonably or negligently—in order to determine defendant manufacturer’s liability. On the other hand, the juiy must next focus on plaintiff’s conduct, in order to find that plaintiff was negligent. The jury must then compare its focus on plaintiff’s negligent conduct with its focus on defendant’s defective product—eliminating, as irrelevant, any consideration of whether defendant’s conduct was unreasonable or negligent—to determine the amount of the reduction in plaintiff’s total damages. The end result of this configurational analysis by a jury, I submit, based as it must be—on a comparison of noncomparables—will necessarily constitute a patently unfair result.
Juries have been uniformly instructed over the years that they are “not permitted to award a party speculative damages, which means compensation for future loss or harm which, although possible, is conjectural or *755not reasonably certain.” (See BAJI No. 14.60 (1977 rev.).) But the majority’s holding today will require juries to reduce a party’s “reasonably certain” damages by using speculation, conjecture or occult divination and thus produce a verdict for damages that is the very antithesis of the principle enunciated by BAJI No. 14.60—an instrument which will continue to be given to juries in personal injury cases.
The guessing game that will be imposed on juries by the application of comparative negligence principles to defective product liability cases will be further enhanced in those cases in which several defendants are joined in an action—some being sued on a negligence theory and others on the defective product theory and where there are several plaintiffs whose conduct may range from no negligence at all to varying degrees of negligence. The jury will be required to determine percentages of fault with respect to all the parties (and perhaps some nonparties) by seeking to compare and evaluate the conduct of certain parties with the product of other parties to produce 100 percent of fault as the necessary starting point in order to calculate a reduction in the damages suffered by each plaintiff found to be negligent. I cannot agree with the majority that such a process is reasonably workable or that it will produce an equitable result to injured plaintiffs. If a just or fair result is reached by a jury under the majority’s holding, it will be strictly accidental and accomplished by pure happenstance.
With all due deference to the scholarly analysis and discussion found in the majority opinion, I must conclude, nevertheless, that the majority’s view constitutes a glaring failure to appreciate the limitations on, and the realities of, our jury trial system. Under the majority’s view, jurors are expected to accomplish a feat which trained judges cannot accomplish, namely, to reach a just result by starting with an untenable premise that totally different things—a plaintiff’s negligent conduct and a defendant’s defective product—can be added together and assigned percentages to total 100 percent, without having the means to reduce the two noncom-parables to a common denominator which is the necessary ingredient to produce reasonably accurate percentages. There is no common denominator by which factors such as pounds, circles, quarts, triangles, inches, and squares can be added together for a total so that a determination can be made of the percentage contribution of each to the total. This is the situation we deal with in requiring juries to reduce a plaintiff’s total damages resulting from a defendant’s defective product by a conjectural determination of a percentage contribution to thosé damages resulting from plaintiff’s negligence.
*756The majority finds significance in the provisions of the proposed Uniform Comparative Fault Act (Act), authored by Professor Wade, “a recognized torts scholar” and a “distinguished professor of law.” The proposed Act adopts the principles of comparative fault. It defines “fault” to include acts or omissions that constitute negligence or that subject a person to strict tort liability. The proposed Act requires a reduction in a plaintiff’s recovery based upon plaintiff’s proportionate contributory fault. But with all due respect to the high academic qualifications of the author, the Act possesses the same weaknesses that I find in the majority’s assumptions. The Act does not produce a practical formula, or any formula at all, by which the jury can avoid the task of employing conjecture, surmise and speculation in seeking to compare noncomparable factors that make up the Act’s concept of total “fault.” The Act’s provisions, therefore, suffering from the same weaknesses that permeate the majority’s holding, offer no support in logic, reason or fairness to the majority’s holding.
The majority calls attention to the fact that some legal scholars and some states have either moved, or have advocated moving, in the direction of the application of comparative negligence principles to strict-liability-in-tort cases. Such authorities do not demonstrate that the principle espoused is a viable one. The fact that some legal scholars and states are satisfied with a tort principle that requires and sanctions speculation and guesswork on the part of juries—necessarily producing inequities to consumers who have suffered injuries from manufacturers’ defective products—constitutes no basis for this court to follow suit.
It is my view that justice, fairness and equity are not served by the majority’s application of the Li principle of comparative negligence to the tort principle of a manufacturer’s strict liability in tort for a product defectively manufactured or defectively designed. Granting that a plaintiff was negligent when he suffered injury from using a defective product, a fair and equitable result is reached by imposing on the defendant manufacturer liability for the total damages suffered. This result is preferable to that of subjecting the injured plaintiff’s claim to a diminution of his total damages suffered—predicated on the jury’s application of the highly speculative, conjectural and chance formula of comparing two noncomparables.
It appeals to my sense of reason, justice and equity that we continue the existing legal principle which permits manufacturers to spread through society the costs of compensating injured plaintiffs fully, rather *757than the adoption of an untenable legal principle which will result in reducing the total costs to be spread by manufacturers, but at the expense of injured plaintiffs by reducing their recovery below the full losses sustained through the necessarily fortuitous, conjectural and haphazard determinations to be made by juries.
Bird, C. J., concurred.

Assigned by the Chairperson of the Judicial Council.

BAJI instruction No. 3.10 provides:
“Negligence is the doing of something which a reasonably prudent person would not do, or the failure to do something which a reasonably prudent person would do, under circumstances similar to those shown by the evidence.
“It is the failure to use ordinary or reasonable care.
“Ordinary or reasonable care is that care which persons of ordinary prudence would use in order to avoid injury to themselves or others under circumstances similar to those shown by the evidence.
“[You will note that the person whose conduct we set up as a standard is not the extraordinarily cautious individual, nor the exceptionally skillful one, but a person of reasonable and ordinary prudence.]”

BAJI instruction No. 3.50 (1975 rev.) provides:
“Contributory negligence is negligence on the part of a plaintiff which, combining with the negligence of a defendant, contributes as a [proximate] [legal] cause in bringing about the injury.
“Contributory negligence, if any, on the part of the plaintiff does not bar a recovery by the plaintiff against the defendant but the total amount of damages to which the plaintiff would otherwise be entitled shall be reduced in proportion to the amount of negligence attributable to the plaintiff.”