Court Opinion

ID: 9749975
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-28 14:09:19.900301+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:26:00.871339
License: Public Domain

Dissenting Opinion by
Mr. Justice Musmanno :
The majority opinion says that the hedge involved in this case was merely a “passive background,” but if it was a contributing factor to the happening of the accident, would its passiveness exclude the owner from liability? Suppose the additional defendant had dug a hole in the highway in front of his property and, in attempting to avoid the excavation, the automobile driver had struck the plaintiff, could it be argued in such a situation that the excavation was merely a passive background and therefore impossible of contributing to the accident?
Immobility is not a synonym for passiveness. Even a sleeping lion is immobile but it is far from passive.
The defendant driver avers that had it not been for the hedge, the collision with the plaintiff would not have occurred and specifies the reasons. The demurrer admits the truth of the averments. An appellate court *564cannot say that the hedge had nothing to do with the accident when the complaint specifically declares that it had much to do with the accident.
In addition, the hedge was maintained in violation of a zoning ordinance, which, in itself, is evidence of negligence.
The majority says that if the additional defendant were required to go to trial, “a nonsuit would inevitably result.” I cannot share the majority’s clairvoyance. How does it know what evidence would be presented by the defendant to show that the hedge so confused and misled him, so impeded his passage, so shut off his vision that the accident was the inevitable result of the obtruding, illegal hedge? I fear that the majority has grown a hedge of arbitrary assumptions which has shut off the view of simple cause and effect, and I, therefore, must dissent.