Court Opinion

ID: 9623605
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 06:37:47.172043+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:05:32.112825
License: Public Domain

KENNARD, J., Dissenting.
Does a landowner who has no possessory interest in adjoining premises containing a dangerous condition, who has no legal right to control either the premises or the dangerous condition, and who did nothing to create or aggravate the danger have a duty to protect others from the danger? Before today the answer under California law would be “No.” The majority, however, holds that persons who lack the right to control either the dangerous condition or the land on which it is located, and who have done nothing to create or increase the danger, have such a duty merely because they have conducted some unrelated activity on the neighboring land. Because the majority imposes the duty based on innocuous or good-neighborly conduct that does not contribute to the danger and therefore carries no moral blame, its expansion of tort liability runs counter to traditional notions of tort law.
I
On the night of April 17, 1990, plaintiff Gilardo C. Alcaraz walked from the public sidewalk onto a narrow strip of land located in front of the rental property where he had lived for 22 years, stepped on a broken water meter box, and was injured. Both the narrow strip of land and its water meter box belonged to the City of Redwood City (hereafter City). Alcaraz sued his *1175landlord, Peter Vece, seeking damages under a theory of premises liability.1 The complaint alleged that the meter box was located on property owned by Vece at 141-147 Lincoln Avenue in the City, and that therefore Vece was legally responsible for its defective condition, which was the proximate cause of Alcaraz’s injuries.2
Vece moved for summary judgment. He presented undisputed evidence that the City owned the strip of land containing the water meter box and maintained the box.
In opposition, Alcaraz argued that even if Vece did not own the water meter box or the land on which it was situated, Vece nonetheless had a duty to repair the broken meter box or to warn Alcaraz about its condition in light of Vece’s control over the City-owned land. As indicia of such control, Alcaraz pointed to (1) the periodic mowing, by Vece’s gardener, of the two-foot-wide strip of grass-covered land that was owned by the City and contained the City’s meter box; and (2) Vece’s construction, after the accident, of a picket fence that separated the lawn area from the public sidewalk and enclosed both Vece’s land and the City’s.
The trial court entered summary judgment for Vece.
II
The majority holds that summary judgment should not have been granted because “a triable issue of fact exists” whether Vece “exercised control over the property surrounding the meter box and thus had a duty to protect plaintiff from, or warn him of, the hazardous condition of the meter box.” (Maj. opn., ante, at p. 1161.) According to the majority, a jury could well decide that control sufficient to impose on.Vece a duty to protect others from or warn them about the hazardous condition of the meter box could be established by evidence that Vece’s gardener had been mowing the grass on the two-foot-wide strip of land owned by the City and containing the City’s meter box, together with evidence that after the accident Vece built a picket fence around the grassy area in front of his rental property, enclosing both his land and the City’s narrow strip of land. {Id. at p. 1170.)
The majority’s holding finds no support in California case law, which until now has imposed a duty to protect others from dangerous conditions on *1176land only upon those persons who (1) have the legal right to control either the premises containing the dangerous instrumentality or the dangerous instrumentality itself, or (2) created or aggravated the hazard on the land.
The general rule of premises liability is set forth in this court’s decision in Sprecher v. Adamson Companies (1981) 30 Cal.3d 358, 368 [178 Cal.Rptr. 783, 636 P.2d 1121], which states that a landowner has a “duty to take affirmative action for the protection of individuals coming upon the land.” This duty arises because ownership of land includes the “right to control and manage the premises.” (Ibid., italics added.) The landowner’s “mere possession with its attendant right to control conditions on the premises is a sufficient basis for the imposition of an affirmative duty to act.” (Id. at p. 370, italics added.) The right to control the premises lies at “ ‘the very heart of the ascription of tortious responsibility’ ” in premises liability actions. (Id. at p. 369, quoting Connor v. Great Western Savings & Loan Assn. (1968) 69 Cal.2d 850, 874 [73 Cal.Rptr. 369, 447 P.2d 609, 39 A.L.R.3d 224] (dis. opn. of Mosk, J.); accord, Preston v. Goldman (1986) 42 Cal.3d 108, 118-119 [227 Cal.Rptr. 817, 720 P.2d 476].)
The “right to control” gains special significance when more than one individual has a legal interest in land containing a dangerous condition, because it provides a means of ascertaining who has the duty to warn or protect others from that condition. (See Low v. City of Sacramento (1970) 7 Cal.App.3d 826, 831 [87 Cal.Rptr. 173] [noting that “the aggregation of powers called ownership” can be divided and the “various kinds of control [can be] held in separate hands”].) In that situation, the existence of duty depends upon whether a particular interest includes the right to control that part of the premises containing the dangerous condition. (Uccello v. Laudenslayer (1975) 44 Cal.App.3d 504, 511 [118 Cal.Rptr. 741, 81 A.L.R.3d 628]; see Johnston v. De La Guerra Properties, Inc. (1946) 28 Cal.2d 394, 399-401 [170 P.2d 5].)
For example, although the interests of a landlord and a tenant in property leased by the tenant overlap to some extent, the tenant has a present interest in the premises while the landlord has only a future reversionary interest. Therefore, the landlord’s relinquishment of the rental premises to a tenant generally imposes on the tenant, not the landlord, the duty to protect others from dangerous conditions on those premises. (Uccello v. Laudenslayer, supra, 44 Cal.App.3d at pp. 510-511; Prosser & Keeton, Law of Torts (5th ed. 1984) § 63, p. 434 [“In the absence of agreement to the contrary, the lessor surrenders both possession and control of the land to the lessee. . . .”]; see Rowland v. Christian (1968) 69 Cal.2d 108, 119-120 [70 Cal.Rptr. 97, 443 P.2d 561, 32 A.L.R.3d 496] [residential tenant liable for *1177dangerous condition within area of leasehold].) But when the landlord retains the right to control certain parts of rental premises (typically common areas), the law imposes on the landlord the duty to use ordinary care to eliminate dangerous conditions in the areas of retained control. (Johnston v. De La Guerra Properties, Inc., supra, 28 Cal.2d 394, 399; Uccello v. Laudenslayer, supra, at p. 511.)
In Johnston v. De La Guerra Properties, Inc., supra, 28 Cal.2d 394, this court upheld a jury verdict imposing damages on both a commercial landlord and its tenant for injuries to a patron of the tenant’s restaurant who was injured in a common area of the premises, namely, a walkway leading to the restaurant’s back door. This court held the landlord liable, applying the principle that a landlord who retains the right to control common areas has a duty for injuries occurring in such areas. (Id. at pp. 399-400.) But the tenant was also held liable, because it had a “limited right of control” over the same common area, as evidenced by its installation of a neon sign at the rear entrance beckoning patrons to use the walkway to enter the restaurant. {Id. at p. 401.)
In some situations, the right to control premises containing a hazardous condition or instrumentality may be found in someone who has no ownership or leasehold interest in the premises. For instance, a landowner may grant that right to an independent contractor or licensee. (See Morehouse v. Taubman Co. (1970) 5 Cal.App.3d 548 [85 Cal.Rptr. 308].) In such a case, the contractor or licensee would have a duty to protect those coming onto the land from a dangerous condition or instrumentality on the land because of the contract- or license-based right to control those premises.
In other situations, an individual’s “right to control” may extend only to the dangerous condition or instrumentality itself and include no other portion of the premises, and yet the individual would have a duty to protect or warn others of the hazard because the right to control the dangerous condition carries with it “a concomitant right and power to obviate the condition and prevent the injury.” (Uccello v. Laudenslayer, supra, 44 Cal.App.3d at p. 511; accord, Connor v. Great Western Savings & Loan Assn., supra, 69 Cal.2d 850, 874 (dis. opn. of Mosk, J.) [the right to control the “agency of harm” gives rise to a duty to protect others from the harm].)
As I have just explained, the right to control land or dangerous conditions on the land may exist separately from any property interest. California courts, in determining whether a duty of care exists in premises liability actions, have therefore treated a possessory interest in property with its attendant right to control the property as a concept separate from the right of *1178control over property that is not grounded in any possessory interest, and they have occasionally used the shorthand term “control” to denote what is more correctly described as the “right to control.” (See generally, Isaacs v. Huntington Memorial Hospital (1985) 38 Cal.3d 112, 134 [211 Cal.Rptr. 356, 695 P.2d 653] [“A defendant cannot be held liable for the defective or dangerous condition of property which it did not own, possess, or control.” (Italics added.)]; Gray v. America West Airlines, Inc. (1989) 209 Cal.App.3d 76, 81 [256 Cal.Rptr. 877] [“In premises liability cases, summary judgment may properly be granted where a defendant unequivocally establishes its lack of ownership, possession, or control of the property alleged to be in a dangerous or defective condition.” (Italics added.)].) These cases do not suggest, as the majority would have it, that a person who has no possessory interest in adjoining land or who lacks the legal right to control the land or the hazardous condition on it assumes a duty to protect others against or warn them of the danger on the land, simply because of some innocuous activity that the individual performed on the neighboring land.
Rather, the general rule to be drawn from California case law is that, in premises liability actions, those who have a right to control either the premises containing a dangerous condition or the dangerous condition itself have a duty to correct the hazard or to warn others of it. The converse, of course, is also true. Absent the right to control either the premises or the dangerous condition, there generally is no duty to correct or to warn. (See Gillespie v. City of Los Angeles (1950) 36 Cal.2d 553, 556 [225 P.2d 522] [City of Los Angeles had no duty to post signs warning motorists of a hairpin curve on Topanga Canyon Road, and hence no liability for failing to do so, because it was a state highway over which the city had no legal authority].)
One exception to this general rule is when a person’s conduct or activity on another’s land causes or increases the risk from a hazardous condition on that land. In that situation, California courts have not hesitated to subject the person to liability. Thus, in Kopfinger v. Grand Central Pub. Market (1964) 60 Cal.2d 852, 859 [37 Cal.Rptr. 65, 389 P.2d 529], the operator of a butcher shop located in a large public market hall was held liable to a customer who slipped and fell on a small piece of meat dropped on the sidewalk outside the market during meat delivery. The defendant butcher shop’s use of the sidewalk for commercial purposes in the course of which the hazard was created was held to give rise to a duty by the butcher shop to discover and remove the hazard. (Ibid.) Similarly, in Schwartz v. Helms Bakery Limited (1967) 67 Cal.2d 232, 235-239 [60 Cal.Rptr. 510, 430 P.2d 68], a bakery was held liable for injuries to a small boy who was hit by a car as he ran across the road to catch up with the bakery truck after its driver had agreed
*1179to wait for the child to go home and to return with money to buy an item from the truck. A duty to protect others from harm arises in cases such as these because the defendant either created the dangerous condition on someone else’s property (as in Kopfinger), or by some affirmative conduct aggravated the danger to the plaintiff (as in Schwartz).
In contrast, when, as here, a defendant’s conduct on another’s land does not create or aggravate a dangerous condition on that land, California law imposes no duty on the defendant to protect others from the hazard. Thus, in Hamilton v. Gage Bowl, Inc. (1992) 6 Cal.App.4th 1706, 1712-1713 [8 Cal.Rptr.2d 819], the owner of a bowling alley and adjoining parking lot in which a bowling alley patron was injured when a sign fell off an adjacent building was held not to have a duty to protect the patron from the danger of the falling sign. The court noted that the owner of the bowling alley did not own either the building or the sign; therefore, the owner lacked the right to control the danger posed by the sign. It was considered irrelevant to the issue of duty that the bowling alley owner had painted the wall on the adjacent property and maintained his own advertisement on it (thus, arguably, under the view of the majority here, exercising “control” over the neighboring property containing the dangerous condition). As the court in Donnell v. California Western School of Law (1988) 200 Cal.App.3d 715, 720 [246 Cal.Rptr. 199], aptly stated: “The law of premises liability does not extend so far as to hold [a defendant] liable merely because its property exists next to adjoining dangerous property and it took no action to influence or affect the [harmful] condition of such adjoining property.”
In summary, under California law persons who have the right to control premises containing a dangerous condition, or who have the right to control the dangerous condition itself, or whose conduct caused or contributed to the hazard have a duty to protect others from the hazard. Therefore, contrary to the majority’s holding, our law does not impose a duty on a landowner to correct or warn of a dangerous condition on neighboring land when the landowner has no right to control that property, and did not create or aggravate the hazardous condition.
Undaunted, the majority seeks, without avail, to justify its holding by relying on two federal appeals court decisions, Husovsky v. United States (D.C. Cir. 1978) 590 F.2d 944 [191 App.D.C. 242] and Orthmann v. Apple River Campground, Inc. (7th Cir. 1985) 757 F.2d 909, and on section 328E of the Restatement Second of Torts.
The same two reasons that the California cases I discussed earlier have articulated in imposing a duty to protect—affirmative conduct creating a *1180hazard and a right to control the premises containing the hazard, a right that arises from a possessory interest or an agreement with one holding the possessory interest—underlie Husovsky v. United States, supra, 590 F.2d 944. That case imposed on the United States Government a duty of care to a motorist who was injured when a tree located on land belonging to the Government of India fell on his car. The land had been left in its natural state pursuant to a written agreement that the United States had negotiated with India 20 years before the accident. Therefore, the United States had in effect created the hazardous condition. In addition, the court found the existence of a “unique relationship . . . between the United States and the tract of land” containing the tree in question, based on certain acts by the United States Government indicating the right of control and supervision over the land owned by India. {Id. at p. 592.) These acts included “[t]he initial and subsequent surveys of the land, the agreement with India concerning the use to which it could be put, placement and maintenance by the Park Service of monuments and stakes with United States insignia . . . .” {id. at p. 593, fn. omitted) and “[t]he presence for over twenty years of permanent granite markers bearing the United States’ insignia indicating] that the Indian Government did not contest the indicia of federal control over the tract.” {Id. at p. 953, fn. 20.)
Similarly misplaced is the majority’s reliance on Orthmann v. Apple River Campground, Inc., supra, 757 F.2d 909 (hereafter Orthmann). In that case, the plaintiff sued certain businesses located on the Apple River for injuries he sustained when diving into the river. The businesses were engaged in a joint venture, the Floater’s Association, that rented out inner tubes for floating down a four-mile stretch of the river; members of the association owned most of the land on both sides of that stretch of the river. The plaintiff rented an inner tube, but interrupted his floating to go ashore at a spot belonging not to the association but to the Montbriand family. A tree on the property that grew out over the river was a popular location for diving. When the plaintiff arrived at the tree, several others were waiting to dive from it, so the plaintiff dived from the riverbank instead and was injured. (Id. at pp. 910-912.)
To decide whether the plaintiff’s complaint stated a negligence claim under Wisconsin law, the federal appeals court in Orthmann first posited that the Floater’s Association, by advertising its inner tube rental to potential customers, had issued an implied invitation for persons renting inner tubes “to use the tree and surrounding land for diving into the river.” (Orthmann, supra, 757 F.2d at p. 913.) The court reasoned that under these circumstances the association would be “prima facie liable” if it owned the land where the diving took place. (Ibid.) The plaintiff’s complaint, the court *1181concluded, was sufficient to satisfy the liberal federal pleading requirements based on statements in a supporting affidavit that, after the accident, an association member had gone onto the riverbank of the Montbriand property without permission and cut down the tree. The federal court held that even though the defendants did not own the part of the riverbank from which the plaintiff dived into the river, it was possible to infer from the tree-cutting activity that they had “treated it as if they did.” (Ibid.)
Therefore, under Orthmann, a duty of care arises only when a landowner either creates a dangerous condition on neighboring land or encourages a particular use of that land resulting in the plaintiff’s injury. (Orthmann, supra, 757 F.2d at pp. 913 [discussing the association’s encouragement of diving as part of the basis for imposing a duty of care on its members], 914 [giving two examples of when treatment of neighboring land as one’s own could give rise to liability, one involving the landowner’s creation of a dangerous pothole on adjoining land and the other in which the landowner encouraged a particular use of adjoining land that exposed the plaintiff to the dangerous condition].) Here, Vece neither created the hazard posed by the City’s broken water meter box nor encouraged a particular use of the City’s land leading to plaintiff’s injuries.
According to the majority, “[i]t would be anomalous to conclude that a person who wrongfully takes possession of land owned by another, exercising control over that land, cannot be held liable for injuries caused by a dangerous condition of the property.” (Maj. opn., ante, at p. 1159, fn. 3.) The majority equates “exercising control” over adjoining land with “possession” of land. In support, the majority cites to Restatement Second of Torts section 328E, which defines the term “possessor of land” to include “a person who is in occupation of land with intent to control it” and to section 328E’s comment a, which states that “[t]he important thing in the law of torts is the possession, and not whether it is or is not rightful as between the possessor and some third person.” (See maj. opn., ante, at p. 1159.) Upon close examination, however, section 328E and comment a have no application here. Ignored by the majority is the next sentence to comment a explaining that under section 328E, a person who occupies land with intent to control it can be a possessor with a duty to protect others coming upon the land only if that person is a “disseisor,” that is, someone in the process of gaining ownership of another’s land through the legal doctrine of adverse possession. (Rest.2d Torts, § 328E, com. a, p. 171 [“Thus a disseisor is a possessor from the moment that his occupation begins, although as between the disseisor and the true owner he is not legally entitled to possession until his adverse possession has ripened through lapse of time into ownership.”]; and *1182see 4 Witkin, Summary of Cal. Law (9th ed. 1987) Real Property, § 93, p. 318 [explaining how title is gained through “disseizen”].)3
In order to occupy another’s land with the intent to control it for purposes of gaining title through adverse possession, a person must exercise dominion over the property in such a way as to put the true owner on notice that the person claims a right, title and interest in the land. (4 Witkin, Summary of Cal. Law, supra, Real Property, § 96, p. 320; id., § 104, pp. 323-324.) The claim of right must be “hostile” to the possessory rights of the true owner. Therefore, “[i]f the owner permits the person to use the land, the possession is not adverse.” (Id., § 97, p. 321.) Furthermore, the hostile occupancy under a claim of right must continue uninterrupted for a full five-year period (Code Civ. Proc. §§318, 319, 325; 4 Witkin, supra, Real Property, § 108, p. 328), during which time the disseisor must have paid all taxes levied or assessed on the property (Code Civ. Proc., § 325; 4 Witkin, supra, Real Property, § 110, p. 330). Understood in light of these substantial preconditions for gaining title to land through adverse possession (none of which is satisfied in this case), section 328E of the Restatement Second of Torts does not support the majority’s expansive and unprecedented holding that when, as here, a landowner performs innocuous or good-neighborly activity on neighboring property, he or she may be said to “exercise control” over that land, thus warranting imposition of a duty to protect or to warn others of dangers on that land.4
In its eagerness to impose liability where none existed before, the majority does not even bother to consider the test this court articulated in Rowland v. Christian, supra, 69 Cal.2d 108, 113, in determining the existence of duty. Pertinent are such considerations as the closeness of the connection between *1183the plaintiff’s injury and the defendant’s conduct, the moral blame attached to the defendant’s conduct, advancement of the public policy of deterring or preventing future harm, the extent of the burden to the defendant and the consequences to the community in imposing a duty to exercise care and subjecting the defendant to liability for breach of the duty, and the availability of insurance. These factors weigh against the majority’s imposition of a duty of care here, as I explain below.
When, as here, a plaintiff suffers injury from a dangerous condition on land over which the defendant has no right of control, and the defendant’s innocuous or good-neighborly activity on that land neither created nor aggravated the hazard, there is no nexus between the plaintiff’s injury and the conduct of the defendant. Therefore, the defendant bears no moral blame. Nor would imposition of liability in this circumstance advance society’s interests in punishing wrongdoers and in preventing future harm; instead, it would discourage individuals from undertaking socially beneficial actions on neighboring property or turn those who do so into guarantors of the safety of others coming onto the adjoining property. Furthermore, persons lacking any lawful interest in the premises containing a hazardous condition have no insurable interest in those premises. Accordingly, consideration of the various factors set forth in Rowland v. Christian, supra, 69 Cal.2d 108, 113, do not support the creation of a duty of care in this case.5
III
The majority’s holding suffers from yet another serious flaw. The majority leaves it to the jury, on a case-by-case basis, to decide as “a triable issue of fact’’ the issue of when a landowner has “exercised control" over adjoining property so as to give rise to a duty of care. (Maj. opn., ante, at p. 1153.) But the majority never explains what it means to “exercise control” over adjoining premises. Pity the poor trial judge who after today’s decision will have to fashion a jury instruction on this point.
Furthermore, the majority claims that leaving this decision for the jury is entirely consistent with the rule that the existence of duty is a question of *1184law to be decided by a court. (Maj. opn., ante, at p. 1162, fn. 4; see generally, Knight v. Jewett (1992) 3 Cal.4th 296, 313 [11 Cal.Rptr.2d 2, 834 P.2d 696]; Ballard v. Uribe (1986) 41 Cal.3d 564, 572, fn. 6 [224 Cal.Rptr. 664, 715 P.2d 624]; see also Kentucky Fried Chicken of Cal., Inc. v. Superior Court (1997) 14 Cal.4th 814, 832 [59 Cal.Rptr.2d 756, 927 P.2d 1260] (dis. opn. of Kennard, J.) [“Whether a defendant has a duty to use reasonable care to avoid harm to the plaintiff is decided as a matter of law . . . .”].) But it is not. When facts are not in dispute, deciding whether those facts give rise to a legal duty is a question for the court rather than the jury. (Rest.2d Torts, § 328B, subd. (b), p. 151; id., com. e, p. 153; Prosser & Keeton, Law of Torts, supra, § 37, at p. 236 [“whether, upon the facts in evidence, such a relation exists between the parties that the community will impose a legal obligation upon one for the benefit of the other .... is entirely a question of law . . . [to] be determined only by the court”]; Mozingo by Thomas v. Memorial Hosp. (1991) 101 N.C.App. 578 [400 S.E.2d 747, 753] [“When there is no dispute as to the facts ... the issue of whether a duty exists is a question of law for the court.”]; Gabrielson v. Warnemunde (Minn. 1989) 443 N.W.2d 540, 543, fn. 1 [88 A.L.R.4th 237] [“It is not . . . the jury’s function to determine whether the facts give rise to a duty. Rather, the jury’s role is to resolve disputed facts, upon which the court then determines whether a duty of care exists.”].) Here, there is no dispute that Vece’s gardener periodically mowed the grass on the City’s two-foot-wide strip of land containing the City’s water meter, and that Vece, after the accident, built a picket fence that enclosed both his land and the City’s, separating the entire lawn from the public sidewalk.
The majority denies that “the simple act of mowing a lawn on adjacent property (or otherwise performing minimal, neighborly maintenance of property owned by another) generally will, standing alone, constitute an exercise of control over property and give rise to a duty to protect or warn persons entering the property.” (Maj. opn., ante, at p. 1167, italics added.) But the majority never decides whether the occasional mowing of the City’s adjacent narrow strip of land by Vece’s gardener in this case is the type of “minimal, neighborly maintenance of property owned by another” that will not give rise to a duty. Thus the majority leaves open the possibility that a jury here and in future cases may well decide that just such minimal, neighborly acts do establish control over adjoining property sufficient to give rise to a duty to prevent harm.
With regard to Vece’s construction of a picket fence, that action took place after the accident in this case. In the majority’s view, evidence of the fence building is relevant to the issue of Vece’s control over the City property before the accident. Even under the rule that the majority announces today, however, that evidence has no relevance, as I discuss below. *1185Under that rule, a landowner with no legal interest in adjoining property has a duty to protect others from harm on that property if the landowner has exercised “control” over that property. Logically, that duty can come into existence only after the defendant has begun the conduct that constitutes such control. When, as here, the defendant after occurrence of the harm on the neighboring property engages in some new activity on that property, the new activity has no “tendency in reason to prove or disprove” (Evid. Code, § 210) that before occurrence of the harm the defendant had engaged in conduct sufficient to constitute control over the adjacent property.
In arriving at a contrary conclusion, the majority relies on a decision by the Court of Appeal in Morehouse v. Taubman Co., supra, 5 Cal.App.3d 548. In Morehouse, a contract allocated responsibilities at a jobsite between the general contractor and the subcontractor. At issue was which of the two had the contractual right of control over a specific safety requirement. Because the question was one of contractual intent, one party’s assumption of control of that safety requirement after an accident was held to be indicative of that party’s understanding that it had the obligation all along. Here, however, the issue is not one of contractual or any other form of intent, but the actual control by Vece over the City’s land and the water meter box on that land before the accident.
Even if Vece’s construction of the picket fence were relevant under the majority’s test, I doubt the wisdom of a rule permitting judicial consideration of after-the-fact conduct as a basis for determining the existence of control before the occurrence of the harm. Such a rule discourages a landowner who learns of an accident involving a dangerous condition on neighboring property from taking any remedial steps to protect others from the hazard, because it might expose the landowner to civil liability on the theory that his or her postaccident conduct established control over the adjacent premises.
Conclusion
Unlike the majority, I would hold that a landowner who has no possessory interest in adjoining property containing a dangerous condition, who has no legal right to control the neighboring premises or the dangerous condition, and whose innocuous, good-neighborly activity on that property has neither caused nor increased the hazard thereon, has no duty to prevent harm to others. Applying this approach to the undisputed evidence that Vece offered in support of his motion for summary judgment, I conclude that Vece had no duty to protect others against the harm posed by the City’s broken water *1186meter box on City-owned land. Vece had no legal interest in or right to control the City’s meter box located on the City land running along the front of Vece’s rental property. Furthermore, plaintiff Alcaraz never alleged that Vece caused or aggravated the danger posed by the City’s broken water meter box. Therefore, Vece established the absence of duty (an essential element of plaintiff’s case), thereby entitling him to summary judgment. (Sprecher v. Adamson Companies, supra, 30 Cal.3d at p. 362; Gray v. America West Airlines, Inc., supra, 209 Cal.App.3d at p. 81.)
The majority in this case adopts an ill-conceived and unprecedented expansion of tort liability. By untethering tort liability from either the existence of any legal right to control the property or conduct that creates or aggravates the harmful condition, the majority unduly expands both the scope and uncertainty of negligence liability. A person’s innocuous or good-neighborly acts on the land of another (for example, mowing a lawn, planting flowers, or regularly picnicking) can now make him or her liable to anyone coming on that land, even though there is no causal connection between the acts and the subsequent injury. Nor can anyone be certain just what acts on the land of another will amount to sufficient “control” so as to lead to liability, because all such questions will henceforth be decided by the jury on a case-by-case basis.
Under the majority’s rule, defendant Vece would have been better off and not subject to liability if instead of mowing the City’s adjoining strip of land, he had left it in its natural state, unkempt and a blight on the neighborhood.
I would reverse the judgment of the Court of Appeal and reinstate the trial court’s grant of summary judgment for Vece.

Alcaraz did not sue the City and conceded at oral argument that he had not preserved his right to do so because he did not file the required claim within the statutory time. (See Gov. Code, §§905, 911.2.)

Also named in the complaint were four additional owners of the property at 141-147 Lincoln Avenue. For simplicity’s sake, I will refer to the property owners collectively as the landlord or as Vece.

The majority asserts that under comment a to section 328E, any conduct that can be construed as an act of control can give rise to a duty. (Maj. opn., ante, at p. 1159, fn. 3.) The majority is wrong. Comment a gives only one illustration of a person occupying land with the intent to control it: a person in the process of gaining ownership through the legal doctrine of adverse possession. Comment a thus seems directed at those who occupy land with intent to control it for all purposes, that is, those who exercise the degree of control required for adverse possession. Moreover, even assuming that something less than an ongoing effort to gain ownership through adverse possession might qualify as occupation of another’s land with the intent to control it within the meaning of section 328E, nothing in comment a suggests this could include innocuous or good-neighborly activity such as a landowner’s mowing of a small strip of adjoining land, as involved here.

This court has never adopted section 328E of the Restatement Second of Torts as the law of California, and I can see no reason to do so in this case. Not only are the facts here wholly insufficient to constitute a hostile, open and notorious occupation of the City’s land under a claim of right, but the property on which the activity took place belongs to a public entity (the City) and therefore a disseisor may not gain title to it by adverse possession. (Civ. Code, § 1007 [public land not subject to adverse possession]; 4 Witkin, Summary of Cal. Law, supra, Real Property, § 94, pp. 319-320 [same].)

I am not persuaded by Justice Mosk’s proposal that adjoining landowners should have a duty of care with regard to any “appurtenances” (conc. opn. of Mosk, J., ante, at p. 1173) that provide some benefit to their property, such as “ ‘coal holes, meter boxes, and other devices of similar character located in the sidewalk which benefit the abutting owner. . . ” (Ibid.) Like the majority, Justice Mosk fails to take into account the policy considerations enunciated in Rowland v. Christian, supra, 69 Cal.2d 108, 113, in determining the existence of a duty. For reasons I have fully articulated earlier, I cannot agree that someone who lacked the right to control a defective appurtenance on adjoining land and who did not create or increase the hazard should nevertheless be held liable for the harm posed to others.