Court Opinion

ID: 9448968
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-03 23:51:15.317234+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:31:37.911644
License: Public Domain

CLARK, Circuit Judge
(dissenting).
In this case my brothers take the unusual course of upsetting a jury verdict and remanding for a new trial because the charge to the jury was inadequate in a single aspect, even though the defendant had not pointed out how it was inadequate or asked for a correction at the time. The issue arises as to notice to the defendant of the condition of the tub, and the court did tell the jury that “notice can either be actual notice or constructive notice.” When the two forms of notice are thus contrasted, and before lawyers’ refinements have made the question difficult, the concept of constructive notice cannot be hard to grasp or be beyond the intelligence of the ordinary jury. The court went on to explain that “you can infer from the testimony, from the facts as you heard them, whether or not the hotel had what we know in the law as constructive notice of this condition.” This did not in terms mention the element of time; if the judge had added some such statement as “if it had existed for such a length of time that defendant should have known of it,” the charge would have been acceptable, albeit not windy. But plaintiff’s two sisters had each testified — in testimony which the judge later carefully recalled to the jury — that she had observed the bad condition of the tub upon coming into the bathroom at 7 p. m., the accident happening the next day about 11 a. m. It was thus obvious that these were thé facts from which the jury could infer “whether or not the hotel had what we know in the law as constructive notice of this condition.” While the emphasis upon the passage of time might have been more pointed, yet the implication of a natural basis for the crucial inference is clear and the reversal as a matter of law thus an unjustifiably harsh corrective. I would affirm.