Court Opinion

ID: 9444872
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-03 21:14:52.684395+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:30:02.889447
License: Public Domain

HAND, Circuit Judge
(dissenting).
If there had been even the proverbial scintilla of evidence that the plaintiff had looked to her right before she left the south curb, I should agree that the jury might have found that she exercised care, and enough care, for her own safety; for, as I read it, the courts of Vermont have said that a pedestrian does not have to keep up a repeated watch while crossing a street. Aiken v. Metcalf, 90 Vt. 196, 97 A. 669; Healy v. Moore, 108 Vt. 324, 187 A. 679; Duchaine v. Ray, 110 Vt. 313, 6 A.2d 28. But I cannot find a single thread on which to hang the inference that she ever looked to the right at any time either preparatory to crossing or while crossing. I submit that the fact that she may have been struck south of the center line of the street is wholly irrelevant to whether she had looked to the right at any time, however important it may be in fixing the defendant’s fault. To support the verdict we must either invoke a presumption that people do not cross two-way streets without looking both ways; or that the jury would have been justified in holding that a person passing across the street from south to north exercises enough care, if he does not look to his right before he gets within two or three feet of the center line. I do not understand that the plaintiff asserts that there is any such presumption in Vermont; and, if the jury in fact did hold that one need not look to the right before one actually crosses the center line, in my judgment they were patently wrong.
I hope it may not be amiss to add that a resort to such momentary lapses of care as we are all prone to everyday, as a means of dealing with what the *881English call “running down cases” is to my mind at best exceedingly questionable. However, I did not make the law, or that added bit of procedure which kept the plaintiff off the stand in the case at bar; and I deem it my duty to apply the rules of Vermont as I find them, regardless of what my preferences might be, if I were free to rebuild the law nearer to my heart’s desire. In this record I can find not a whisper to support the conclusion one way or the other as to whether the plaintiff took any care at all to watch for west-bound vehicles; and, if that were so, I do not understand that my brothers, any more than I, would think that the judgment should be affirmed.