Court Opinion

ID: 9723430
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 10:14:35.334908+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T13:18:33.884767
License: Public Domain

JOHNSON, J., Concurring.
I agree with my colleagues the broad holding in the majority opinion of the California Supreme Court in John R.1 compels reversal of this court’s initial decision in the instant case. I separately concur, however, to urge the Supreme Court majority to reconsider its opinion in that case—at least the breadth of its holding—as applied to the facts of this case. •
At one point I was tempted to distinguish the facts of Kimberly M. from those of John R. There are very real differences. John R. was 14 years old, Kimberly M. only 5 years old at the time of molestation. Anyone who has been a parent knows an adult has vastly greater dominion over a five-year-old than over a fourteen-year-old. Most five-year-olds told to undress will comply without hesitation and would submit to most forms of sexual abuse without objection, indeed without even knowing at the time they were being abused. On the other hand, a teacher’s—or indeed a parent’s—ability to order or otherwise compel a 14-year-old to engage in activities he or she does not want to is problematical at best. Thus the authority the teacher exerted over the five-year-old victim in the instant case was at least equal to the authority the deputy sheriff exerted over the victim in White2 and far *550greater than the rather tenuous influence the teacher in John R. could expect to wield over the fourteen-year-old in that case.
Moreover, the molestation here took place on the school grounds rather than at a remote location as it did in John R. This made it far easier to actually supervise the teacher-student relationship. It also created an appearance of supervision calculated to be more reassuring to the parents of five-year-olds entrusted to the care of the school system. Thus the public school not only granted the teacher the authority which she used to molest Kimberly M. but it also supplied the physical and supervisorial environment in which the molestation took place. This is a further ground on which Kimberly M. can be distinguished from John R.
Thus it is possible to distinguish the facts of the instant case from the facts of this recent Supreme Court authority. However, this is not enough to justify a failure to follow the holding announced, in that opinion. As I had occasion to observe in a different context: “Nearly every case can be differentiated in some way from any other. Even those that are ‘on all fours’ with each other will not be ‘on all eights’ or ‘on all sixteens.’ The question is whether they differ in legally significant ways, that is, ways that mean the rule as announced by the Supreme Court applies to one factual situation but not to the other.” (Baccus v. Superior Court (1989) 207 Cal.App.3d 1526, 1539 [255 Cal.Rptr. 781] [dis. opn.].)
In John R., the Supreme Court announced an extraordinarily broad rule—essentially that for policy reasons school districts are not liable under respondeat superior for acts of sexual abuse their teachers may commit against their students. (John R. v. Oakland Unified School Dist., supra, 48 Cal.3d 438, 450-453.) Under the rule as formulated it makes no difference how much authority the teacher wields over the student, how vulnerable the student is, or where the sexual abuse occurs. It is not for an intermediate appellate court to chop away at the flanks of a Supreme Court ruling even where it disagrees with the high court’s opinion or with its application to the somewhat different facts of a new case. Accordingly, I do not dissent from my colleagues in concluding John R. controls and requires affirmance of the trial court’s dismissal of Kimberly M.’s action against the school district.
At the same time I urge the California Supreme Court to use this case as a vehicle to reconsider the scope of the majority decision in John R. The arguments against this broad brush rejection of liability were made most effectively in the persuasive dissenting opinions Justices Kaufman and Mosk filed in John R. However, those arguments gain still more power when focused on the facts of Kimberly M. Meanwhile many of the policy *551arguments the majority urged in support of its position lose their force when applied to a teacher’s sexual abuse of a five-year-old on school premises.
Respondent’s petition for review by the Supreme Court was denied January 17, 1990. Mosk, J., was of the opinion that the petition should be granted.

 John R. v. Oakland Unified School Dist. (1989) 48 Cal. 3d 438 [256 Cal.Rptr. 766, 769 P.2d 948],

 White v. County of Orange (1985) 166 Cal.App.3d 566 [212 Cal.Rptr. 493] [county liable for acts of deputy sheriff who ordered woman motorist into his patrol car and threatened her with rape and murder.]