Court Opinion

ID: 9665565
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-24 00:51:34.23895+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:15:16.779771
License: Public Domain

McCown and Smith, JJ.,
dissenting.
We respectfully dissent. Restatement 2d, Torts, § 367, p. 267, states: “A possessor of land who so maintains a part thereof that he knows or should know that others will reasonably believe it to be a public highway is subject to liability for physical harm caused to them, while using such part as a highway, by his failure to exercise reasonable care to maintain it in a reasonably safe condition for travel.” A special note immediately following the section and preceding the comments reads: “This Section deals with a possessor’s liability to persons harmed while actually upon his land. It is placed among the Sections dealing with conditions harmful to persons outside of the land because many of the cases dealing with the subject make the liability depend upon the fact that the other reasonably believes that the land is a highway, being misled by the actor’s conduct into such belief, and do not treat the actor’s conduct as giving the other a license or an invitation to enter. The injured person, being misled by the other’s conduct, is clearly not a trespasser and, therefore, he does not fall within any of the classifications under which it is customary to place persons entering the land.” (Emphasis ours.)
The majority opinion also grounds the finding of con-*205tributary negligence of the plaintiff as a matter of law upon the general rule that a driver of a motor vehicle is guilty of negligence if he drives in such manner that he cannot stop in time to avoid a collision with an object within the range of his vision. That general rule has many exceptions. One of them involves, situations in which the object struck cannot ordinarily be observed by the exercise of ordinary care in time to avoid a collision. Weisenmiller v. Nestor, 153 Neb. 153, 43 N. W. 2d 568.
It should also be noted that a traveler on a highway need not keep' his eyes constantly fixed on the road or path of the highway to look for defects which should riot exist, nor is he required to exercise such extreme vigilance as in all events to see defects or obstructions in the road ahead such as a cable stretched across the road. See 40 C. J. S., Highways, § 268, p. 317.
. The addition of one 4 x 12 inch sign appended somewhere on a 30-foot cable stretched across a roadway, in our opinion, should not, as a matter of law, convert the plaintiff into a trespasser, nor transform the 3/4-inch cable into an object which the driver of a vehicle is required to see. Reasonable minds certainly might differ as to whether either or both the plaintiff or the defendant exercised ordinary care under the circumstances here.
For the reasons stated, we believe that the issues of the defendant’s negligence and of the plaintiff’s contributory negligence were all questions of fact which should have been submitted to the jury under appropriate instructions.