Court Opinion

ID: 9744760
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 22:15:24.591949+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:24:51.469257
License: Public Domain

RAYE, J., Dissenting.
This case involves civil liability for grisly family violence. An abusive father shot his wife in the face, then telephoned his adult son, who lived nearby, and told him he had murdered his mother and was about to shoot himself. When the son, accompanied by his pregnant wife, arrived a few minutes later, the father had his shotgun pointed at his head and insisted on committing suicide. The son wrestled with him for control of the shotgun. His wife sustained minor injuries when the shotgun fired. The father survived and was convicted of murder. Not surprisingly, the son suffers severe posttraumatic stress disorder. He sued his father on a variety of legal theories, all of which were ultimately rejected by the trial court.
Lamenting “the relentless march of logic,” while touting the ennobling virtue of “experience,” (maj. opn., ante, at p. 488) the majority denies plaintiff all relief, reasoning that “[h]eartache and emotional pain are an inherent staple of the parent-child relationship.” [Id. at p. 495.) Because I find little in the rules of logic or the lessons of human experience to support the majority’s views, I respectfully dissent.
The majority discerns that duty is “the crux of this matter” and duty “is a matter of policy” determinable as a question of law. (Maj. opn., ante, at p. 494.) And so it is. “[T]he problem of duty is as broad as the whole law of negligence.” (Prosser & Keaton on Torts (5th ed. 1984) pp. 357-358.) But in performing its policy calculus, the majority does little more than recapture the angst of earlier years when claims for emotional distress were met with universal disdain. However, the policy judgments underlying recognition of emotional distress as a compensable injury have been made by the Supreme Court. We may question the clarity and wisdom of its pronouncements but the “relentless flow” of its policy judgments runs counter to the majority decision. As sympathetic as I might be with the exasperated tone of the opinion, the majority has chosen an inappropriate outlet to vent its frustration. “Enough already” is a sentiment which aptly applies to many ill-considered lawsuits appealed to this court; the current case does not warrant such a response.
Recognition of a duty between family members to refrain from the conduct of the type here at issue will not tear families asunder or lead to lawsuits by frustrated parents or homework-stressed students and, most importantly, would not be a radical departure from past articulations of duty. *499To understand why this is so requires a brief historic review of the rules pertaining to negligent infliction of emotional distress (NIED).
Supreme Court decisions regarding NEED exhibit the court’s profound ambivalence on the subject. There is, on the one hand, a strong recognition that emotional injury can be as disabling and life altering as physical injury, with all the attendant economic consequences that merit compensation. That recognition is tempered, however, by a fear that claims may often be trivial or fraudulent, by a lack of faith in the ability of science to distinguish legitimate from false claims, and by a similar skepticism regarding the ability of juries to calculate damages. The concern with legitimacy and quantification applies to claims for both intentional and negligent infliction. Additional concerns apply to claims for negligent infliction of emotional distress—concerns that permitting recovery for clearly legitimate emotional injury on the same terms as physical injury would expose citizens to tort liability for even innocuous behavior and overwhelm the courts with numerous and difficult cases. The court has struggled to develop principled standards for compensating the truly injured without imposing unacceptable social costs. The concept of duty has played a central role in this struggle.
Duty can be defined either in terms of risk (whether defendant’s conduct posed an unreasonable risk of foreseeable injury to someone) or in terms of relationship (whether the personal relationship between defendant and plaintiff warrants imposition of a duty). Until recently, duty for purposes of NIED was defined largely in terms of risk of physical injury, and duty was found to exist only in narrowly circumscribed circumstances. Initially, recovery was only permitted when there was physical injury and emotional distress was parasitic to the injury. Later, physical impact, even without injury, provided a basis for recovery. Still later, plaintiffs within a zone of physical danger were permitted to recover. Nonetheless, in all cases, duty was effectively restricted; defendants did not owe a duty to the world at large to avoid conduct creating an unreasonable risk of inflicting emotional harm. The ambit of duty was for all intents and purposes the same as that imposed for physical injuries. However, the law recognized emotional injuries suffered by those who might otherwise be subject to physical harm. By restricting duty in such a manner, the courts greatly limited the number of potential claimants and tied recovery for emotional injury to situations more likely to result in credible claims. Duty extended only to those who were physically endangered by defendant’s conduct.
The scope of duty was expanded, however, with the court’s decision in Dillon v. Legg (1968) 68 Cal.2d 728 [69 Cal.Rptr. 72, 441 P.2d 912, 29 A.L.R.3d 1316], which extended the range of duty beyond those at risk of *500physical injury. Duty was owed to “bystanders,” percipient witnesses, who are (1) closely related to a victim who suffers physical injury, (2) present at the scene, and (3) aware of the injury-producing event as it occurs. Bystander principles also reflected a concern with validating injuries by tying recover to physical injury; duty was tied to a risk of physical injury, albeit to a third party. As the majority correctly observes, the bystander cases “ ‘all arise in the context of physical injury or emotional distress caused by the negligent conduct of a defendant with whom the plaintiff ha[s] no preexisting relationship, and to whom the defendant had not previously assumed a duty of care beyond that owed to the public in general.”’ (Burgess v. Superior Court (1992) 2 Cal.4th 1064, 1072-1073 [9 Cal.Rptr.2d 615, 831 P.2d 1197], italics omitted.) I concur with the majority that appellant is not among that number.
The rules were changed with the Supreme Court’s decision in Molien v. Kaiser Foundation Hospitals (1990) 27 Cal.3d 916 [167 Cal.Rptr. 831,616 P.2d 813, 16 A.L.R.4th 518], which represents a doctrinal shift in the court’s approach to NIED claims. There, the court rejected the need for “a screening device to minimize a presumed risk of feigned injuries and false claims.” (Id. at p. 925.) The court extended a duty to “direct victims” based simply on the foreseeability of possible emotional distress. Physical injury, or the risk thereof, was no longer a requirement. “[T]he jurors are best situated to determine whether and to what extent the defendant’s conduct caused emotional distress, by referring to their own experience.” (Id. at p. 930.) The court soon realized that a limitation based on foreseeability was, in reality, no limit at all. “ ‘[F]oreseeability, like light, travels indefinitely in a vacuum.’ ” (Thing v. La Chusa (1989) 48 Cal.3d 644, 659 [257 Cal.Rptr. 865,771 P.2d 814].) In Marlene F. v. Affiliated Psychiatric Medical Clinic (1989) 48 Cal.3d 583 [257 Cal.Rptr. 98, 770 P.2d 278], the court quickly clarified the applicable principles, explaining that “[djamages for severe emotional distress ... are recoverable in a negligence action when they result from the breach of a duty owed the plaintiff that is assumed by the defendant or imposed on the defendant as a matter of law, or that arises out of a relationship between the two.” (Id. at p. 590.) Further clarifying its holding in Molien, the court explained in Burgess v. Superior Court, supra, 2 Cal.4th 1064 that foreseeability is but a threshold requirement; emotional injury is actionable “in cases where a duty arising from a preexisting relationship is negligently breached.” (Id. at p. 1074.)
Duty was thus defined not in terms of risk but in terms of a relationship. The court concluded there are some preexisting relationships that impose a duty on the parties to refrain from conduct creating a risk of serious emotional injury. The crux of the direct victim theory is the requirement of *501a “preexisting relationship." The presence of a preexisting relationship serves both the validating function of the court’s past articulations of the duty requirement and also limits the number of prospective claimants. The court explained that in bystander cases “the class of potential plaintiffs could be limitless, resulting in the imposition of liability out of all proportion to the culpability of the defendant.” (Burgess v. Superior Court, supra, 2 Cal.4th at p. 1073.) The court thus circumscribed the class of bystanders to whom a defendant owes a duty. These restrictions are unnecessary where the parties have a preexisting relationship. “Rather, well-settled principles of negligence are invoked to determine whether all elements of a cause of action, including duty, are present in a given case;” (Ibid.)
Here the trial court found plaintiff was within the class of persons having a protected interest in being free of the negligent infliction of emotional distress by his father and he had sustained emotional damages as a result of the events which occurred following his father’s telephone call. The trial court’s holding was proper. The parent-child relationship is a “preexisting relationship” and gives rise to a duty on a father’s part to avoid severe emotional harm. The trial court denied recovery because the conduct was not outrageous. As we held in Mercado v. Leong (1996) 43 Cal.App.4th 317 [50 Cal.Rptr.2d 569], and as the majority correctly recognizes here, the outrageousness of the conduct is not an appropriate element of a negligence claim. Plaintiff, like the mothers in Burgess and Mercado, was a direct victim. The limitations on duty arise from foreseeability and policy considerations.
The Supreme Court has not undertaken to describe the nature of the preexisting relationship which gives rise to duty. Certainly, not every fleeting encounter can be characterized as a “preexisting relationship.” However, we need not concern ourselves with fringe issues; there is no doubt under the facts here presented that the parties had a preexisting relationship. The majority assumes that we are free to define such duty as a matter of policy in the same manner as duty is defined in other negligence contexts. This may be so. Their policy formulation, however, fails.
The majority’s analysis of duty begins with the historic concern that “where only emotional distress is claimed the degree of certainty that plaintiff suffered injury is diminished.” The majority then asserts the certainty is diminished further in a family setting, where the connection between defendant’s conduct and injury claimed is “necessarily suspect.” In any event, we are told, one may not assume the closeness of family ties (and hence, presumably, the likelihood of emotional harm) from the existence of a parent-child relationship. Nevertheless, subjecting the “cold, impersonal *502logic of the law into [the arena of family relationships] could lead to the destruction of close family relationships.” Finally, the majority observes that existing statutes impose only limited duties of support on family members. In brief, the majority finds plaintiff is not entitled to protection because claims for pure emotional distress within a family setting are inherently suspect, might be contrived in dysfunctional families, and are potentially destructive of close family relationships in normal families.
Certainly, the possibility of fraudulent claims, standing alone, would not preclude a finding of duty. The Supreme Court has been mindful of that possibility and in Dillon even acknowledged that juries may not always sift good claims from bad. “But such fallibility, inherent in the judicial process, offers no reason for substituting for the case-by-case resolution of causes an artificial and indefensible barrier.” (Dillon v. Legg, supra, 68 Cal.2d at p. 737.) Indeed, the direct victim theory of NIED, is based on the assumption that claims arising from preexisting relationships are less likely to be contrived than claims between strangers. There are few preexisting relationships less likely to produce fickle, fraudulent claims than relationships between family members. That reality is recognized in the majority’s apprehension that permitting recovery might be destructive of family relationships. The concern is not that claims are likely to be contrived, but that the threshold for emotional harm is lower in the family setting. However, that must be counterbalanced by the reluctance of most families to air their private disputes in public forums. It is true that not all families are close; conduct which produces extreme anxiety in one family might only produce a yawn in another. The conduct in the present case is not of that character. Under Molien, recovery is permitted only for “serious” emotional harm. In any event, the question of whether defendant’s conduct produced the serious emotional harm asserted by plaintiff is a question of fact for the jury, not a question of duty for us.
The majority offers various examples of stress-producing conduct between family members in an effort to explain the folly of imposing a duty on defendant in the present case. Whatever my thoughts on the hypotheticals offered by the majority, I am not persuaded that imposing a duty on the defendant to avoid exposing his adult child to horrific family violence is foolish. Certainly disputes over homework bear no relation to murder and attempted suicide. For that reason I would reverse the judgment.
A petition for a rehearing was denied December 16,1997, and the opinion was modified to read as printed above. Appellant’s petition for review by the Supreme Court was denied March 18, 1998. Kennard, J., was of the opinion that the petition should be granted.