Court Opinion

ID: 9458752
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 21:00:36.697802+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:35:52.863461
License: Public Domain

CRAVEN, Circuit Judge
(dissenting) :
When the Army orders reserve soldiers to active training duty, authorizing the use of personal motor vehicles for transportation, I should think any good actuary could predict how many motor vehicle collisions would occur per thousand soldier-miles traveled. The question is not whether there will be collision, but how many, and how bad. I wish that the law of automobile negligence, however slowly, might someday catch up with insurance company actuarial reality. Until it does, we have to proceed case by case, making careful distinctions on the basis of outworn concepts derived from demonstrably false notions of the fault principle.
I think it is impossible to explain vicarious liability by reference to a fault rationale and that courts ought to recognize what we are doing and leave off what we have been saying. What we are doing is simply another manifestation of strict liability. It seems to me irrelevant in determining vicarious liability whether Sergeant Bell was actually subject to Army control at the time he operated his privately owned automobile in a head-on collision causing serious injuries to the plaintiffs. The truth about it is the Army would have had no control over the operation of his motor vehicle had he been driving an Army truck full of Army soldiers on an Army mission. Yet we are stuck with the control test or, failing that, the more general and conveniently vague right of control test.
Professors Harper and James speak to this, referring to
the once current notion that implied authority or command by the master *835was the true basis of liability; it represents a failure to realize the full implications of the philosophical basis for vicarious liability. This (though it insists in a sense on fault) puts on the employer the risks of all those faults which may fairly be regarded as incidental to his enterprise. His personal fault or innocence is beside the point; and so are the limits upon his consent or authorization, save possibly insofar as he may in reason expect those limits to be observed in fact. If he should know that he cannot make limitations practically effective, the risk of their violation should be borne by the enterprise that creates this risk and not thrown on the innocent victim.
Harper & James, 2 The Law of Torts 1379.
I am convinced the district judge rightly spoke of Sergeant Bell’s conduct as being “within line of duty.” He was authorized mileage and the use of his vehicle to return directly to his home upon completion of his assigned duties and was engaged in that enterprise, under proper orders, and without the slightest deviation, at the time of negligent injury to plaintiffs. With Professors Harper and James, I think that we should not be “looking for the master’s fault but rather for risks that may fairly be regarded as typical of or broadly incidental to the enterprise he had undertaken.” Harper & James, 2 The Law of Torts 1376.
I would distinguish United States v. Eleazer, 177 F.2d 914 (4th Cir. 1949), and other North Carolina decisions upon which it rests, on the ground that in Eleazer the soldier was driving his own car home on deferred leave, whereas in this case Sergeant Bell was under orders to return to his home from his duty station and was proceeding directly and without deviation pursuant to those orders. I agree that in neither case was the Army in any practical position to exercise control over the manner of operation of the vehicle, but it is never so. Not even a passenger in an automobile can effectively exercise control of the driver, and certainly an absentee superi- or officer cannot. Here there was the theoretical “right of control,” and that should suffice.
I believe that a distinction based on active duty or leave would be a start in the direction of imposing vicarious liability on those who should properly bear the risks, and I know of no North Carolina case indicating that the Supreme Court of North Carolina would not make such a distinction. I think that Sergeant Bell was sufficiently about' the affairs of the United States Army to support the district judge’s mixed finding of fact and law that the sergeant was acting within the scope of his employment as a member of the Army Reserve at the time of the collision so as to impose upon the United States vicarious ■liability.