Court Opinion

ID: 9626740
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 08:22:56.424126+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:06:33.113302
License: Public Domain

RANSOM, Chief Justice (specially concurring). I concur specially to make the same point that I made in my dissent to Calkins v. Cox Estates, 110 N.M. 59, 66, 792 P.2d 36, 43 (1990). I agree with the majority in the instant case that whether a duty was owed must be decided as a matter of law using existing legal policy. The crux of the duty analysis that is required, however, is not a factual foreseeability determination, but rather it is a legal policy determination. This distinction is critical. In New Mexico, as stated in the majority opinion, we define negligence as an act foreseeably involving an unreasonable risk to that individual who complains of injury. See also SCRA 1986, 13-601. Foreseeability is most often a question of fact and only rarely, as in Palsgraf, may foreseeability be considered a false jury issue. Most often, duty as a matter of law turns not on an absence of the fact issue of foreseeability, but rather the policy issue of whether it is reasonable to impose a duty to avoid a risk of injury which, although foreseeable, is remote. Id. at 67, 792 P.2d at 44. Succinctly, while Chief Judge Cardozo held in Palsgraf that there can be no duty in relation to another person absent foreseeability (“risk reasonably to be perceived”), it does not follow that duty necessarily is present if risk of injury to that other person is foreseeable from one’s acts and omissions. Chief Judge Cardozo was addressing only the victim of an act that was innocent and harmless with respect to that victim. If no hazard was apparent to the eye of ordinary vigilance, an act innocent and harmless * * * with reference to [Helen Palsgraf] did not take to itself the quality of a tort because it happened to be a wrong * * * with reference to some one else. * * * The plaintiff sues in her own right for a wrong personal to her, and not as the vicarious beneficiary of a breach of duty to another. Palsgraf, 162 N.E. at 99-100. When Chief Judge Cardozo wrote that “[t]he risk reasonably to be perceived defines the duty to be obeyed, and risk imports relation,” id. at 100, he was talking about the absence of a duty in relation to one not foreseeably at risk. It is unfortunate that in Ramirez v. Armstrong, 100 N.M. 538, 673 P.2d 822 (1983), this Court stated in reference to Palsgraf that, “If it is found that a plaintiff, and injury to that plaintiff, were foreseeable, then a duty is owed to that plaintiff by the defendant.” Ramirez, 100 N.M. at 541, 673 P.2d at 825. That principle simply does not follow from Palsgraf In Calkins, the Court fell into error when it adopted that principle, and when it reasoned that a relationship that gives rise to a duty as to one perceived risk necessarily gives rise to a duty as to any risk foreseeably progressing in a natural and continuous sequence from violation of the first duty. The law, not the fact of proximate cause, defines duty. The Court stated in Ramirez that, “In order to insure that the interest to be protected is actually foreseeable, courts * * * have adopted a number of criteria to be met in any case where such injury is claimed.” Ramirez, 100 N.M. at 541, 673 P.2d at 825. In point of fact, however, the recited criteria did not delimit foreseeability, but rather remoteness as a matter of public policy. For example, one criterion is that shock to the family members claiming negligent infliction of emotional distress must be caused by contemporaneous sensory perception of the accident resulting in physical injury or death to another family member. Yet, it is clearly foreseeable that severe shock may be caused by learning of the accident by means other than contemporaneous perception. Ramirez is not a Palsgraf case. To the extent it does turn on foreseeability, Ramirez acknowledges the foreseeability of family bystanders unknown in fact to the wrongdoer (not unlike the foreseeability of family dependents unknown in fact to the wrongdoer). Factually, I cannot accept a resolution of this case that purports to hold as a matter of law it was not foreseeable that a twenty-five-year-old man “would reside with his parents, that there would be a close and loving relationship with them, and that they would be partially dependent on him for their economic support.” I believe financially dependent parents indeed are foreseeable. A person is not an innocuous package importing no relation to others as was the package of fireworks that exploded when dislodged from the arms of Helen Palsgraf s fellow passenger. As with severe shock to unknown family bystanders, it is foreseeable that parents of an adult child would suffer loss of financial support and consortium from his wrongful death. The parents of the deceased failed to state a cause of action, not because the wrongdoer could not reasonably perceive a risk to the economic security of persons dependent upon the victim of wrongful death, rather, as a matter of public policy, because it is not reasonable to impose a duty to avoid a risk of economic injury or loss of consortium to certain dependents. The legislature has declared in the wrongful death act the state’s policy as to beneficiaries of damages to be awarded in every action for wrongful death. Others who suffer economic injury or loss of consortium are denied a claim for relief, not because risk of harm to them is unforeseeable, but because of policy set by the legislature. Finally, in addition to my disagreement that as a matter of law the existence and interests of the parents and their relationship with their son were unforeseeable, I disagree that their interests in economic security and consortium were not “palpable”, by which I take the majority to mean those interests were imperceptible or nominal. I agree only that “[t]he social policy of cutting off liability that would otherwise extend to these family members seems sound.” Social policy indeed became the determinative rationale of the majority opinion when the author seemingly adopted the suggestion in Prosser & Keeton that the presence of foreseeability is but one fact in determining the existence of duty, and “the problem is one of social policy: where to draw the line against otherwise unlimited liability.”