Court Opinion

ID: 9787241
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-31 00:13:44.668944+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:36:45.011288
License: Public Domain

SPANGLER, District Judge (Retired),
concurring in part and dissenting in part.
[¶ 18] I agree that the summary judgment should be reversed. I do not agree that the issue on remand should be whether VI-Doug is liable for gratuitously posting an allegedly unsafe warning.
[¶ 19] The issue of property owner liability has produced a series of irreconcilable decisions in Wyoming. This is partly due to the application of two rules that are not in the public interest. The first rule is that the owner or occupier of the premises has no obligation to protect invitees against open and obvious dangers. The second rule is that owners and occupiers are not liable for injuries caused by natural accumulations of ice and snow. The case of O'Donnell v. City of Casper, 696 P.2d 1278 (Wyo.1985), limited the open-and-obvious-danger rule to situations where the danger results from the natural accumulation of ice and snow.
[¶ 20] The open-and-obvious-danger rule is contrary to Wyoming's comparative negligence law. The effect of the rule is to dismiss the case when the plaintiff may be negligent, without comparing the negligence of the actors.
[¶ 21] The majority opinion incorrectly says that the open-and-obvious-danger rule has nothing to do with negligence but defines the duty owed by a defendant to a plaintiff. It is an essential element in all tort causes of action that the defendant owes a duty to the plaintiff. The duty is that of the defendant to the class occupied by the plaintiff, as in the duty owed by a doctor to his or her patient. The duty element in this case was correctly defined earlier in the majority opinion: "As a general rule, a possessor of land owes a duty to his business invitees to maintain his premises in a reasonably safe condition." Eiselein v. K-Mart, Inc., 868 P.2d 893, 895 (Wyo.1994). There is no issue about duty in this case.
[¶ 22] The open-and-obvious-danger and snow-and-ice rules are about negligence, not about duty. One rule says that the personal representative is barred from recovery because of Mrs. Miles' negligent conduct in unreasonably proceeding in the face of an open and obvious danger. The other rule says that VI-Doug is not negligent because it cannot reasonably be expected to remove snow and ice from its premises.
[¶ 23] The rules are contrary to public policy. They discourage property owners from removing or mitigating dangerous conditions. If the owner lets snow and ice accumulate, he is not liable. But if he attempts to remove it, he loses his immunity.
[¶ 24] The ruling in this case demonstrates the policy shortcomings. The case against VI-Doug continues only because it placed an informational or warning sign on the door. The personal representative apparently is precluded from raising what could be a much more important allegation, which is that VI-Doug allowed the door to blow dangerously in the wind for an extended time.
[¶ 25] Application of these rules has produced decisions which cannot be reconciled. The majority opinion in this case says that walking in the front door of a Village Inn Restaurant is to proceed in the face of an open and obvious danger. But in the O'Don-mell case, the court did not find that there was an open and obvious danger in driving a *705motorcycle on a street covered with piles of loose gravel.
[¶ 26] Similarly, the cases of Eiselein, 868 P.2d 893, and Selby v. Conquistador Apartments, Ltd., 990 P.2d 491 (Wyo.1999), involved plaintiffs slipping and falling on snow and ice in parking lots. The Eiselein case was dismissed even though there were indentations in the paving. The Selby case survived only because there was a dumpster on the parking lot.
[¶ 27] From this experience, we can see that one of the difficulties in applying these rules is in defining a "natural" condition. Are wind, ice, and snow "natural" onee they have landed on a parking lot or are battering a doorway?
[¶ 28] We should abrogate the "open-and-obvious-danger" and "snow-and-ice" rules. Instead, a plaintiff's cause of action in all cases against owners and occupiers of property, including landlord and tenant cases, should consist of the following elements: (1) The plaintiff was lawfully on the premises; (2) there was an unreasonably dangerous condition on the property; (8) the owner or possessor knew of the dangerous condition or should have known through the exercise of reasonable diligence; (4) the owner or possessor did not take reasonable action to mitigate or remove the danger; and, (5) as a result, the plaintiff suffered legally compen-sable injuries.