Court Opinion

ID: 9757348
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-28 22:34:57.717451+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:28:38.444857
License: Public Domain

Duncan, J.,
dissenting: Today’s decision may come as an expectable extension of Thompson v. Thompson, 105 N. H. 86; but when that case was decided the court declined to hold that the law of the forum, which was the law of the place of the domicile of the parties, should determine in addition to their interspousal rights and liabilities, the standard of care to govern their conduct abroad as well as at home. Id., 89.
Obviously the host-guest relationship is not restricted to husband and wife, and the considerations relied upon to decide today’s case furnish no satisfactory guidance in the case where the guest is unrelated to his host by blood or marriage and is domiciled in a different jurisdiction. In Dow v. Larrabee, 107 N. H. 70, a majority of the court noted the general rule that the law of the state where conduct and injury occur will be applied to determine whether the actor’s conduct has satisfied required standards of behavior; and concluded that the host-guest case then before it called for no exception to that principle.
Determination of the standard of care to be invoked in the case now before us appears to me to involve considerations more closely allied to those which govern the question of what law shall regulate conduct, than to those presented by the issue of what law shall determine whether a wife may recover against her husband, or a minor child against his parent. Hence I would apply the law of the place where the conduct and injury occurred, not alone in the interest of establishing a rule capable of consistent application to host-guest cases, but also in the conviction that the way in which an actor shall be required to act is of greater concern and more appropriately left to the state where he chooses to act, than it is to some other state where he has a home *359which he has left behind him. See Leflar, 41 N. Y. U. L. Rev. 267, 293-294.