Court Opinion

ID: 9704905
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 00:49:34.408174+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:22:06.378811
License: Public Domain

Fairchild, C. J.
(dissenting). Where both the driver and the pedestrian, with equal opportunity to see, are assessed with failure to look out, it is difficult to understand the existence of a possibility of distributing the lookout responsibility between the parties on the basis of 65 per cent and 35 per cent. There may be circumstances where an opportunity for lookout is more favorable to one than to the other, but the specific findings in this case leave lookout on the part of one equal to the lookout on the part of the other. That situation should control the court in fixing the responsibility in the absence of some other element of negligence contributed by one or the other of the parties. The question of management and control was submitted to the jury, it appears to me, without full and complete instructions bearing upon those elements if they are to be added to appellant’s failure to look out in a division of percentage of total negligence producing injuries to respondent. The evidence in the matter of management and control are of enough importance here to warrant granting a new trial.
The recognition of the elements that may constitute causal negligence in motor-vehicle-accident cases is set forth in Reynolds v. Madison Bus Co. 250 Wis. 294, 26 N. W. (2d) 653. A review of that doctrine may be outlined as follows: Negligence in the management and control of a motor vehicle on the part of the operator thereof does not arise until such operator has by his lookout perceived something of potential *414danger that requires him to take some affirmative action on his part to avoid danger. If the threat of potential danger is the invading of his right of way, and he fails to see anything which indicates that this is about to happen until it is too late for him to apply his brakes and swerve his vehicle to be effective in avoiding a collision, he cannot be held guilty of negligence as to management and control. Reynolds v. Madison Bus Co., supra; Weber v. Walters, 268 Wis. 251, 67 N. W. (2d) 395; Marchant v. Franz, 259 Wis. 289, 48 N. W. (2d) 620.
The jury found that speed did not exist as a cause of the accident, and it did find that, in addition to failure to keep a proper lookout by the respondent, he failed in yielding the right of way. The appellant was where he had a right to be, and the jury were convinced that the respondent’s failure in the matter of lookout and not yielding the right of way were causal. In ruling upon the motions after verdict with respect to the jury’s finding of failure in the matter of management and control, the court suggested that the driver might have turned to the right. This does not follow unless the opportunity existed any more than that a duty rested on the respondent, who might have stopped or stepped back. The answer of the jury eliminating speed on the part of the appellant, and the fact that his car was so close to respondent when he first saw him that there is a serious question as to whether it was possible for him to have done anything that in the exercise of ordinary care he would be required to do, warrant the conclusion that unless the failures on the part of the respondent equal those on the part of the appellant there should be a new trial.