Court Opinion

ID: 9564228
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-21 18:56:26.427901+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:18:18.008756
License: Public Domain

Cochran, J.,
dissenting.
As I am unable to reconcile the views expressed in the majority opinion with the principles approved in Crabbe v. School Board and Albrite, 209 Va. 356, 164 S.E.2d 639 (1968), I respectfully dissent.
In Crabbe the motion for judgment alleged that the plaintiff was injured while being instructed, in a high school class, in the use of a power saw. It further alleged that because of the negligence of the School Board the saw was defective and improperly equipped, that plaintiff’s teacher, Albrite, was negligent in permitting the plaintiff to use the tool which Albrite knew, or should have known, was defective and improperly equipped and in failing properly to instruct the plaintiff in the use of the tool, and that as a direct and proximate result of such negligence, plaintiff was injured. In reliance upon Kellam v. School Board of the City of Norfolk, 202 Va. 252, 117 S.E.2d 96 (1960), we affirmed the action of the trial court in sustaining the School Board’s special plea of sovereign immunity. We reversed the *409action of the trial court, however, in sustaining Albrite’s special plea of sovereign immunity which Albrite contended extended from his employer to him. We held that the fact that Albrite was performing a governmental function for his employer “does not mean that he was exempt from liability for his own negligence in the performance of such duties.”
In Crabbe we did not attempt to characterize Albrite’s duties as either ministerial or discretionary. Indeed, the line between ministerial and discretionary functions is not always clear, for it is difficult to conceive of any official act that does not admit to some discretion in the manner of performance. See Prosser, Torts § 126 at 1017 (3ded. 1964). It would seem, however, that the duties of the teacher in Crabbe were no less discretionary than the duties of the intern and the hospital administrators in the present case.
Moreover, the majority opinion casts the nebulous shadow of a new gradation of negligence, greater than ordinary negligence and sometimes perhaps less than gross negligence, so that the special plea of the intern would have been overruled if the motion for judgment had alleged “that he went beyond the scope of his employment or that he was so negligent as to take him outside of his employment.” I not only oppose any extension of the gross negligence rule into new areas of tort litigation but I also disapprove as unwarranted the application of an intermediate degree of negligence to employees whose employers are entitled to plead sovereign immunity.
I would reverse the trial court’s ruling that the sovereign immunity of the University of Virginia Hospital extended to the hospital administrators and the surgical intern and remand the case for a hearing on the merits as to these employees.