Court Opinion

ID: 9642523
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 18:01:23.644662+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:10:48.928240
License: Public Domain

Dissenting Opinion by
Mr. Justice Musmanno :
I regret to see the Majority Opinion state that a “plaintiff cannot recover if his negligence, however slight, contributed to the injury.”
The law progresses slowly enough but with the statement just quoted it not only does not progress at all but in fact retrogresses at least 17 years. It is an inhumane rule which says that a person injured through the proved negligence of another may not recover if he “slightly contributed” to the accident which caused his injury. Suppose A, who is a passenger in B’s automobile, rests his hand on an open window with a finger or two projecting over the sill. C, who is driving Ms car in another lane of travel, crosses over and sideswipes B’s car in such a manner as to crush A’s fingers on the window sill. It is true that if A did not have his fingers outside the car, they would not have been crushed, but it offends against reason and an elementary *365sense of justice to say that so mild and universal a departure from strict rules of safety should deprive the injured person of recovery on the basis that he contributed to the accident. Yet, under the rule pronounced by this Court today, A would not be allowed to recover.
I say that this announcement takes us back 17 years, that is, prior to the period preceding the decision in the case of McFadden v. Pennzoil Co., 341 Pa. 433, 436, when Justice Patterson announced the humane and just rule that: “In order to defeat recovery of damages for injuries arising from the negligence of another, the injured person’s negligence must have been a juridical cause of the injury.”
What is a juridical cause of injury? The phrase was well defined and illustrated in 1880 in Passenger Railway v. Boudrou, 92 Pa. 475, 479, when Justice Trunkey quoted from Wharton on Negligence, as follows : “ ‘In order to defeat recovery of damages arising from the defendant’s negligence, the plaintiff’s negligence must have been the proximate and not the remote cause of the injury; in other words, must be its juridical cause, and not merely one of its conditions.’ ” Also: “ ‘The negligence, to make it a juridical cause, must be such, that by the usual course of events it would result, unless independent moral agencies intervene, in the particular injury. ... In other words, to put the same doctrine into the language made familiar to us by the adoption of the terms “proximate” and “remote,” my “remote” negligence will not protect a person who, by “proximate” negligence does me an injury.’ ”1
In the Boudrou case the plaintiff was standing on the rear plaform of a street car when he was struck by the “pole” (presumably trolley pole) of another car. *366The plaintiff recovered a verdict and the railway company appealed. Defendant’s counsel argued for a reversal of the verdict because the plaintiff’s injury was caused “directly in consequence of his being on the back platform.” But this Court affirmed the verdict and said that it was clear “that a plaintiff may .recover, though he did not use due care,, if his negligence in nowise caused the accident resulting in his injury.”
Justice Trunkey said further that the Trial Judge was correct in charging that “if the jury should find that the plaintiff was negligent in standing on the rear platform, and yet find that the collision could not have ■happened but for the negligence of the driver of. car 14, plaintiffs negligence was remote and. not a tar to his recovery.”
All this in .1880 — not 1958.
I see another ominous layer of darkness in the lowering cloud of the Majority’s announcement that contributory negligence, “however slight”, will bar recovery. Will this cloud blot out the little ray of light which Chief Justice Stern introduced into the Pennsylvania contributory negligence rule. in the case of Kasanovich v. George, 348 Pa. 199? I hope not.
When the strict application of a certain rule of law effects a palpable injustice, it is not unusual, for the observer to observe caustically that the rule- is antiquated and fails to meet modern conditions. However, here we have a situation where, so far as this particular type of action is concerned, justice seems to have been better served three-fourths of a century ago. I find it rather strange to be arguing for an ancient rule as against a current one, but the doctrine asserted today on the subject of contributory negligence can • only cause lovers of a realistic application of law to sigh and long for the good old days of Eighteen Hundred and Eighty?

 Italics throughout, mine.