Court Opinion

ID: 9452494
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 17:42:14.121716+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:33:14.011107
License: Public Domain

CRAVEN, Circuit Judge:
This is a negligence case brought in a Virginia state court and removed to the federal district court by reason of diversity of citizenship. We are to apply the law of Virginia.1
Counsel agree that the sole question presented is whether or not the plaintiff, Mrs. Lydia S. Nuckoles, was con-tributorily negligent “as a matter of law.” There is no disagreement as to the rule of law or standard of conduct by which Mrs. Nuckoles is to be judged. We are not required to attempt, as we sometimes must, interpretation of a difficult state statute; nor need we attempt, albeit without finality, exposition *287of a portion of the state’s “unwritten” law — not yet declared by its highest court. This is one of those cases, then, “where the controversy turns not upon the rule of law, but upon its application to the facts.” 2 Such cases “provoke difference of opinion among judges.” 3
Although “very much impressed” with defendant’s motion for a directed verdict, the trial judge denied it, and thereafter set aside the $3,000.00 verdict in favor of the plaintiff and entered judgment n. o. v. for the defendant on the ground that plaintiff was contributorily negligent as a matter of law.4 The district judge wisely adopted this stratagem for the stated purpose of enabling this court to end the litigation by reinstatement of the jury’s verdict in the event of our disagreement with his decision. We do disagree and reverse.
On June 21, 1962, Mrs. Nuckoles, aged seventy, accompanied by her daughter, went shopping in the Woolworth store in Staunton, Virginia. While walking in a well-lighted aisle fifty-two inches wide, she stepped into or against the side of a pasteboard box negligently left in the aisle by the clerk on duty. Mrs. Nuck-oles partly fell into one of the thirty-three-inch-high counters, scraping her elbow and seriously injuring her left ankle.
A Woolworth clerk testified that she was taking yarn out of the box and placing it on the counter and that she was distracted from this job by a phone call or another customer. She then said: “[J]ust as I left she [Mrs. Nuckoles] must have came around and tripped and when I turned back I saw her.”
The box was thrown away and was not available at the trial. Efforts to describe the box were imprecise, but the testimony tended to show that it was of a color that blended in with the floor.
That the clerk's position with respect to the box may have obstructed Mrs. Nuckoles’ vision of it is a matter of permissible inference. It is true that Mrs. Nuckoles said that nothing obstructed her vision as she walked down the aisle, but she also said that she saw the clerk who then may have been engaged in removing yarn from the box. The jury may have inferred that the clerk’s body concealed the box until she left to answer the phone, at which time Mrs. Nuckoles was within a few feet of her. Such an inference is consistent with Mrs. Nuckoles’ testimony at one point in the record that “when I got that close [two or three feet] to the clerk I didn’t look down.” Most people do not bow their heads and look at their feet while shopping in a store, nor has the Supreme Court of Appeals of Virginia ever prescribed such a standard of care. Instead, the court has noted that shoppers and even floor managers are attentive to counter displays of merchandise. Shiflett v. M. Timberlake, Inc., 205 Va. 406, 407, 137 S.E.2d 908, 910 (1964); Miracle Mart, Inc. v. Webb, 205 Va. 449, 451, 137 S.E.2d 887, 889 (1964).
The defendant relies heavily upon Gottlieb v. Andrus, 200 Va. 114, 104 S.E.2d 743 (1958), which we think is factually distinguishable. In that case, the plaintiff, shopping in a grocery store, did not see (until after she fell) ten or twelve eighteen-inch-square cereal boxes in the aisle. She did not notice the boxes despite the fact that she actually walked between two employees who were then emptying them and putting merchandise on the shelves. Ten or twelve boxes in the process of being emptied by two employees may well have been “open and obvious” to the plaintiff, and her failure to observe them may have amounted, in the words of the Supreme Court of Appeals of Virginia, to plaintiff having “close[d] her eyes, which was the equivalent of what she said she did, and walk[ed] down this aisle without regard to open and obvious articles in it which would have been apparent to her had she looked even casually *288on entering the aisle or at any time before she fell.” 200 Va. at 118, 104 S.E.2d at 747. We do not think that the failure of the plaintiff in our case to note the presence of one box of undefined size but of the same color as the floor, and which might have been concealed by the presence of the clerk until plaintiff was nearly upon it, is so factually similar to Gottlieb as to require the conclusion that Mrs. Nuckoles’ failure to observe the box constituted contributory negligence.
We think what was said in Shiflett v. M. Timberlake, Inc., 205 Va. 406, 137 S.E.2d 908 (1964), is pertinent to the instant case. In Shiflett, the Supreme Court of Appeals of Virginia noted that the plaintiff was looking at a bright display on the counter. She failed to see an accumulation of water on the floor. In reversing judgment n. o. v. for the defendant, the Supreme Court of Appeals, citing Crocker v. WTAR Radio Corp., 194 Va. 572, 74 S.E.2d 51 (1953), said: “Whether the situation was so open, obvious and patent to the plaintiff that in the exercise of ordinary care she should have observed it, was for the jury.” 205 Va. at 411, 137 S.E.2d at 912.
In Crocker, the plaintiff failed to notice different floor levels, the floors varying in height four to six inches. In reversing judgment for the defendant, the Supreme Court of-Appeals of Virginia noted that the situation was “open” to the plaintiff in the sense that there was no obstruction between her and the step, but that it was not necessarily “obvious” to her.
We think the instant case resembles Miracle Mart, Inc. v. Webb, 205 Va. 449, 137 S.E.2d 887 (1964). In that case the assistant manager of the men’s wear department invited the plaintiff to walk down the aisle to examine an article she was interested in purchasing. The assistant manager himself testified that he did not see the foreign substance on the floor because he was not looking down at the floor but was looking around for the desired merchandise. Since the plaintiff was following the assistant manager, the jury was permitted to infer that his presence in front of her might have completely blocked her view so as to excuse her from seeing the foreign substance on the floor.
 Generally, the question of contributory negligence is “for the jury when it arises upon a state of facts from which reasonable men might draw different conclusions either as to the facts or the conclusions or inferences to be drawn from the facts.” 38 Am.Jur. Negligence § 348, at 1052 (1949). [Emphasis added.] The question in this case is not a question of law but is simply a question of judgment or opinion with respect to the facts. See 9 Wigmore, Evidence § 2495 (3d ed. 1940). When we say that the question has become one of law for the court, what we mean is that it is a question of fact upon which reasonable minds could not differ and will, therefore, be decided by the judge rather than by the jury. Ibid. “The ruling will, in truth, depend entirely on the nature of the evidence offered in the case in hand; and it is seldom possible that a ruling can serve as a precedent.” Id. § 2494, at 296. “Unfortunately the inevitable tendency to crystalize the law into mechanical rules has lead the courts in many cases to treat such precedents as fixing definite rules of universal application. Almost invariably the rule has broken down in the face of the obvious necessity of basing the standard upon the particular circumstances, the apparent risk and the actor’s opportunity to deal with it.” Prosser, Torts § 37, at 210 (3d ed. 1964).
Not even a Mr. Justice Holmes can lay down a standard once for all as he purported to do in establishing the rule that a motorist must stop, look, and listen at a railroad crossing — and even get out of his vehicle if necessary to determine whether a train is dangerously near. The standard laid down in Baltimore & O. R. R. v. Goodman, 275 U.S. 66, 48 S.Ct. 24, 72 L.Ed. 167 (1927), lasted only seven years and was “limit*289ed” and effectively overruled in Pokora v. Wabash By., 292 U.S. 98, 54 S.Ct. 580, 78 L.Ed. 1149 (1934).
Since then, the so-called Holmes view —that standards of conduct ought increasingly to be fixed by the court for the sake of certainty5 — has.been largely rejected. 2 Harper & James, Torts § 15.5, at 891 (1956). The tendency has been away from fixed standards and towards enlarging the sphere of the jury. Id. § 15.4, at 883, § 17.2, at 972, § 22.10, at 1228.6
Whether Mrs. Nuckoles exercised that degree of care in looking for hazards in her path that a reasonably prudent woman seventy years old with the vision of a person her age should have exercised was a proper question for jury determination on the evidence in this case. That she did not do so is not so plainly established that reasonable minds cannot be in disagreement.
Judgment for defendant reversed; on remand, the district court will enter judgment on the verdict for plaintiff.
Reversed and remanded.

. But whether plaintiff presented sufficient evidence to take her claim to the jury has been said to be a matter of federal law. General Motors Corp. v. Muncy, 367 F.2d 493, 498 (5th Cir. 1966).

. Cardozo, The Nature of the Judicial Process 163 (1921).

. Id. at 165.

. The authority to order judgment notwithstanding the verdict in federal courts is provided in Fed.E.Civ.P. 50.

. See Holmes, The Common Law 110-12 (1945), for a statement of Mr. Justice Holmes’ position.

. Professor James, in his new work on civil procedure, observes that:
“There has been a school of thought (Holmes was its leading mentor) which would have the courts increasingly particularize the rules or standards of conduct for people to follow in recurring situations. This view would make itself felt through manipulation of the concept of sufficiency of evidence * * * and be implemented by the more frequent granting of the motions [of nonsuit, directed verdict, dismissal, and judgment n. o. v.] * * *. This school of thought has lost ground in the present century, especially in personal injury tort cases.” James, Civil Procedure § 7.13, at 286 (1965).