Court Opinion

ID: 9549651
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 18:22:45.873369+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T15:20:40.261578
License: Public Domain

Hicks, J.
(dissenting) — I dissent. Administrative agencies have a penchant for spawning regulations without end. As a Member of Congress, I served on a subcommittee that had occasion to evaluate regulations promulgated under the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA). While these regulations were generally most appropriate, they were unnecessary, impractical or picayunish (Mickey Mouse) often enough to give me concern as to making violation of any one of them negligence per se in every instance in a damage action.
*923The court is setting policy in this case and I have no quarrel with that. However, I am more comfortable with the rule that violation of administrative regulations be submitted to the trier of fact as evidence of negligence, as the trial court did in this case, rather than to be submitted as negligence as a matter of law. In my view, when violations of regulations are submitted as evidence of negligence, the trier of fact has a better opportunity to use common sense and reach a more nearly just result between the parties.
Until this case, the state of the law in this jurisdiction did not compel the result the majority reaches. Based on past decisions of this court, I believe the Court of Appeals was correct in both Thorpe v. Boeing Co., 5 Wn. App. 706, 490 P.2d 448 (1971), and Loyland v. Stone & Webster Eng'r Corp., 9 Wn. App. 682, 514 P.2d 184 (1973).
I do not read Vogel v. Alaska S.S. Co., 69 Wn.2d 497, 419 P.2d 141 (1966), as does the majority and I find it in point in the instant case.’ Vogel relied on Provenza v. American Export Lines, Inc., 324 F.2d 660 (4th Cir. 1963), cert. denied, 376 U.S. 952, 11 L. Ed. 2d 971, 84 S. Ct. 970 (1964). Provenza was similar to the case at bench except that the trial court refused to admit into evidence for any purpose pertinent administrative regulations. (On appeal, case was reversed with regulations to be admitted in evidence on retrial.) The regulations had been promulgated by the Secretary of Labor pursuant to a mandate of Congress. (33 U.S.C.A. § 941, et seq.)
The majority distinguishes the instant case from Vogel on the ground that the federal safety regulations governed stevedore employers and the suit was against the shipowner, whose duty was to furnish a seaworthy ship.
Provenza v. American Export Lines, Inc., supra at 665 does not find that distinction:
Prior to the enactment of 33 U.S.C.A. § 941 and the promulgations of the regulations thereunder what constituted negligence or unseaworthiness was to be determined by the jury under the definitions laid down by the courts. Now, with respect to longshoring, the statute law *924of the United States has laid down definite standards, and we think the plaintiff longshoreman is entitled to have those standards applied to both the defendants in this case.
Both defendants, in the quote above, refer to the shipowner and the stevedore employer.
In Vogel, at page 501 we say, "Provenza makes the regulations applicable to a nonemployer shipowner." We go on at page 503 to hold, "[t]he regulations are 'applicable'" to the shipowner "in that they give expression to the minimum standards which must be met in order to render conditions aboard the vessel safe, and hence seaworthy." In Provenza the regulations were, on retrial, to be submitted to the jury as evidence and, in Vogel the regulations were approved as having been submitted as evidence of the minimum standard required in order to render conditions aboard the vessel safe. There is no distinction, in my opinion, between Vogel and this case.
In the instant case, WAC 296-25-515 and its supplement No. 13, 7-1-74 do no more than provide an administratively approved standard of safety. By the fiat of this court, the violation of such administratively promulgated standard now becomes negligence as a matter of law in every instance in a damage action. I believe the better course to be to stay with Vogel, Thorpe and Loyland, and submit the regulation to the trier of fact only as evidence of an approved standard, as the trial court did in this case.
Therefore, I would affirm the Court of Appeals and the trial court.
Utter, J., concurs with Hicks, J.