Court Opinion

ID: 9449443
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 16:12:28.126633+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:31:50.386678
License: Public Domain

FRIENDLY, Circuit Judge
(dissenting) .
The trial judge declined to give charges, requested by the plaintiffs, to the effect that Hinchcliffe’s use of a substitute driver in traveling from one customer to another imposed liability on Drew, and that if the jury found that Hincheliffe was present at the time of the. collision, it might also find that Hincheliffe was in supervision and control of' the vehicle and any injuries caused were acts of his for which Drew would be responsible. Although neither of these requests was letter-perfect, they seem to me to have been closer to being right, than the instructions that were given.
The judge began this portion of his. charge by saying that the jury must determine whether “there was any authority — again express or implied — from the defendant Drew authorizing Hincheliffe to permit O’Malley to drive his. car on Drew’s business.” Since he had previously defined “the implied authority of an employee” to mean “actual authority evidenced by the conduct of the employer”, a negative answer to this question was almost inevitable. The judge, then moved onto solid ground by telling-the jury “You may consider here whether-it appears under all the circumstances, that the defendant Drew knew or should, have known that Hincheliffe might call on others to drive his car” — an advance-which, however, was lost when he returned to his “express or implied” Ian-guage, saying:
“Now if you find such authority, express or implied, from the defendant Drew to Hincheliffe, and if you. *503'find that O’Malley was negligent in his operation of the car, then the defendant Drew is responsible. But if .you find that there was no authority, either express or implied from the defendant to Hinchcliffe to use someone else to drive his car while on Drew’s business, then the defendant Drew is not responsible for O’Malley’s negligence.”
In the latter event the jury was instructed to find for the defendant unless it determined that Hinchcliffe himself “was negligent either in allowing O’Malley to drive, or that he was in a position to supervise O’Malley and that he was negligent in failing to do so, and that this negligence of Hinehcliffe’s was the proximate cause of the accident.”
If Hinchcliffe had elected to drive while drunk and the jury found he was conducting Drew’s business at the time, it is plain that the plaintiffs could recover against Drew for his negligence. It is likewise not disputed — indeed, the judge so charged — that if Hinchcliffe, while in pursuit of Drew’s affairs, allowed O’Malley to drive, although he knew or should have known that O’Malley was not in condition to do this competently, Drew would be liable for any injury resulting from O’Malley’s negligence. It would seem curious that if the servant follows a more prudent and thus more foreseeable course of conduct by getting a competent driver to drive, the master should escape liability for the acts of the substitute unless the master’s own conduct can be proved to have evidenced assent to the servant’s action, as would rarely be possible where the “master” is a corporation remote from the area of a “servant’s” activities.
Of course, the question is not what we think but what we think the New York Court of Appeals would think the Supreme Court of Ohio would think.1 See Nolan v. Transocean Air Lines, 276 F.2d 280 (2 Cir. 1960), rev’d and remanded, for further consideration of California law, 365 U.S. 293, 81 S.Ct. 555, 5 L.Ed.2d 591, adhered to, 290 F.2d 904, cert. denied, 368 U.S. 901, 82 S.Ct. 177, 7 L.Ed.2d 96 (1961). New York would find no controlling decision by the Supreme Court of Ohio and conflicting ones by intermediate courts of appeals. Malloy v. Svoboda, 29 Ohio App. 331, 163 N.E. 579 (1928), is helpful to appellants in decision, and even more so in a dictum'in which the court subscribed to the holding in City of Indianapolis v. Lee, 76 Ind.App. 506, 132 N.E. 605 (1921), that when a driver gives the wheel to a friend, the employer is liable. Opposed to this are the decisions of two other Ohio courts of appeals in the Sandlin and Schreiber cases, accurately stated by my brother Kaufman, although the Sandlin decision is quite incomprehensible since the driving by the wife rather than the salesman seems not to have been a cause of the accident. Abundant experience within the federal system, of which United States v. Muniz, 374 U.S. 150, 83 S.Ct. 1850, 10 L.Ed.2d 805 (1963), is a recent example, should be enough to teach us that the highest court does not always follow a majority of the courts of appeals, and although Sandlin and Schreiber are somewhat later than Malloy, none of the three cases is of recent vintage. Decisions t>f the Ohio Supreme Court, such as Cloverdale Dairy and Meyer Dairy, on the issue whether the servant can impose obligations on the master toward a person whom the servant has procured to do the master’s work, are not helpful in determining the scope of the master’s tort liability to third persons. Furthermore, *504they may be distinguishable on the basis that here the jury could find that O’Malley’s driving was indeed “necessary,” within the language of the Ohio Supreme Court, in view of Hinehcliffe’s decision to call on another customer and his inability to drive himself.
With the Ohio authorities in this indeterminate state, I suspect the New York Court of Appeals would think the Supreme Court of Ohio would think what it would think. But that also is not altogether clear. Its early decision in Althorf v. Wolfe, 22 N.Y. 355, sounds in favor of the master’s liability. The last word from the Court of Appeals appears to be Judge Cardozo’s opinion in Grant v. Knepper, 245 N.Y. 158, 156 N.E. 650, 54 A.L.R. 845 (1927). The holding there was that the plaintiff should prevail under the rule of the common law because the defendant’s driver could be found to have been negligent in allowing the incompetent substitute to drive or in failing to supervise him, and also under the New York statute as to the responsibility of owners of motor vehicles. It is true that Judge Cardozo was “not prepared to go so far” as to hold that the mere presence of the servant would make the master responsible for the negligent act of the substitute, and that a dictum indicates he would have ruled in favor of the master “if a competent substitute had been inattentive or remiss at a time when intervention by the servant would have been of no avail.” But all this is readily explicable on the ground, indicated by my brother Kaufman, that there the servant was a truck-driver selected for his special skill in that occupation, or on what to me is the even more satisfying basis that Judge Cardozo was writing in a case where there was no reason whatever for the servant to have made the substitution and thus for the master to have foreseen it; he explicitly excluded “situations of emergency or danger.” Moreover, the age of the gasoline engine had not fully arrived' in 1927; we do not now regard driving a car, as Judge Cardozo may well have regarded driving a truck, as something to be done only by skilled initiates. The lack of later New York Court of Appeals cases dealing with common law liability of the master for a substitute of the servant, and the general paucity of case authority on the subject are doubtless due to the development of statutes imposing liability on a car owner for the negligence of anyone using-a vehicle with express or implied consent, a criterion which Judge Cardozo found, met even on the facts in Grant v. Knepper. This legislative development is one to which courts ought not be blind-
It is hard to believe that Drew would', have cared an iota whether Hinchcliffehimself drove his car on his rounds or had it driven by his wife if she was a good driver, unless, which does not appear, this would have voided Drew’s insurance coverage or increased its premiums. Even more clearly Drew would have preferred to have some other driver at the wheel on the night of August 30, 1954, when Hinchcliffe was experiencing the symptoms he had done so much to-earn. The master is liable in tort for acts of a substitute chosen by the servant, in the course of the latter’s employment. either where the use of a substitute was actually authorized or where this was a risk fairly incidental to the enterprise. See 2 Harper & James, The Law of Torts (1956), 1378-81 and authorities, cited. The basis for this piece of elementary good sense was stated long ago by Lord Brougham: “I am liable for what is done for me and under my orders by the man I employ * * * and the reason that I am liable is this, that by employing him I set the whole thing in motion; and what he does, being done for my benefit and under my direction, I am responsible for the consequences of doing it.” Duncan v. Findlater, 6 C. & F. 894, 910, 7 Eng.Rep. 934, 940 (1839). Surely the jury here could have-found it a foreseeable risk that salesmen who drive cars will occasionally become-ill or even get slightly drunk and will then ask someone else to drive for them, even though the master might have preferred that the servant do nothing until *505full sobriety had been achieved and would have so informed the servant if the latter had communicated with him— in this case, quite unrealistically, by long distance telephone. I can see no reason why the master, who would be liable if the salesman acted imprudently or recklessly, should escape liability if the ill or inebriated servant does the prudent thing of getting a proper substitute to tide him over his difficulty.
We should not be deterred from predicting that the New York Court of Appeals would predict that the Supreme Court of Ohio would reach this sound result by the Restatement of Agency 2d, § 241b. This begins by telling us that authority in a servant to transfer to another the custody of an instrumentality entrusted to him may be found in “an emergency, as where he became disabled,” a statement sufficient to cover this case. However, the next sentence proceeds to qualify this by saying that liability of the master (save for negligent choice by the servant) depends on whether the servant is authorized to employ the substitute as a new servant or simply to entrust the instrumentality to him as a bailee — a distinction rejected, as the Reporter’s Notes recognize, pp. 381-2, by about as many states as accept it. See, e. g., Emison v. Wylam Ice Cream Co., 215 Ala. 504, 111 So. 216 (1927); Farrell v. Pinson Transfer Co., Ky., 293 S.W.2d 170 (1956). The distinction appears to be a residuum left by the maxim delegatus non potest delegare, which, however appropriate to the chariot, does not always achieve a just result when applied to the automobile. It seems also a continued reflection of the somewhat restrictive notions of the original reporter, which gives inadequate recognition to the concept of “inherent authority”, § 8A, developed by his successor and applied elsewhere in the Restatement. The view that my brothers would have the New York Court of Appeals attribute to the Supreme Court of Ohio is also irreconcilable in principle with the many instances where the master is held liable in tort when the servant has violated instructions or has engaged in intentional wrong-doing. See 2 Harper & James, supra, at 1374-76. Federal courts will better fulfill their role in the determination of questions of state law, still undetermined by the state courts themselves, if they make their predictions in the light of principle and of developing trends rather than by a nose-count of decisions of intermediate appellate courts. Compare Mr. Justice Frankfurter’s concurring opinion in Bernhardt v. Polygraphic Co., 350 U.S. 198, 208-212, 76 S.Ct. 273, 100 L.Ed. 199 (1956).
I would reverse.

. I cannot accept appellants’ argument that in the absence of controlling decisions by the Supreme Court of Ohio, the New York Court of Appeals would be bound to follow a decision of the particular Ohio Court of Appeals having jurisdiction where the accident occurred. A decision of an intermediate appellate court is only “a datum for ascertaining state law * * West v. American Telephone and Telegraph Co., 311 U.S. 223, 237, 61 S.Ct. 179, 183, 85 L.Ed. 139 (1940) — not “law” itself. For this purpose a decision by the intermediate appellate Court having jurisdiction over the place of the accident stands no higher than that of a sister court.