Court Opinion

ID: 9452295
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 17:36:13.825879+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:33:09.448199
License: Public Domain

ANDERSON, Circuit Judge
(concurring) :
I concur in the result reached by Chief Judge LUMBARD but would limit the decision to the determination, as a matter of law, that Fermaglick’s negligence was the sole proximate cause of the injury, without basing it also upon the nonexistence of a right in one who is not a purchaser or user of the instrumentality to recover on an implied warranty. While the review of past decisions of the New York courts on the subject is unexceptionable, this is a changing area of the law and it is unnecessary for this court to enter it in this ease. For Ford to be liable here its act or omission must have been a legal cause of the plaintiff’s injury. If there was any negligence by Ford, it was entirely superseded by the negligence of Fermaglick, and the harm to the plaintiff could not under the circumstances be brought within the scope of foreseeability. Under the implied warranty approach it is necessary to ascertain whether or not any non-negligent act by Ford was a legal cause of plaintiff’s injury, which may not be measured precisely the same way as legal cause in negligence liability; but whether the terms used to describe the means for determining legal cause are foreseeability or substantial factor or enterprise cost allocation, all of these concepts are devices for fixing the point beyond which a particular injury is not, in the eyes of the law, attributable to, or within the risk of, a particular event or activity. In my opinion, on the facts of this case, any act by Ford, whether negligent or non-negligent, was clearly beyond that point. But if, for example, a non-negligent defect in the steering mechanism of Fermaglick’s cab caused the cab suddenly to swerve onto the sidewalk and hit the plaintiff who was standing there, then this court would have to decide whether plaintiff’s lack of a purchaser or user relationship to Ford would bar his recovery under the applicable state law. Judge LUMBARD answers this in the affirmative but that is not the case which is before us.