Court Opinion

ID: 9482943
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 09:05:40.286534+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:49:18.300343
License: Public Domain

STEPHEN F. WILLIAMS, Circuit Judge,
concurring.
I agree with the court that plaintiff showed that the rape was “foreseeable”, as the District of Columbia courts have used the term in stating the conditions under which a landlord has a duty to use reasonable care in protecting tenants and others from crimes committed in areas under its control. But I must confess that I am unable to discern either the function of the foreseeability test, or its core meaning, in this context.
Foreseeability normally appears in two places in torts jurisprudence. First, the level of care that a person must take varies with the risks that are “foreseeable” — a term that in substance addresses probability. Thus, under Learned Hand’s familiar formula conduct is negligent if the cost of the defendant’s neglected preventive measure is less than the harm caused by the accident, discounted for its probability. United States v. Carroll Towing Co., 159 F.2d 169 (2d Cir.1947). Second, the “proximate cause” inquiry is in part a determination whether the particular accident was “foreseeable”, that is, likely enough to follow from the defendant’s negligence to justify holding him responsible.
In both these settings the court or jury has some general guidance as to what level of foreseeability (or probability) to look for. In the first inquiry, once the fact finder identifies the “risk”, probability comes in simply for discount purposes — a one-in-100,000 risk deserves more preventive effort than an otherwise equivalent one-in-a-million risk. Here, to be sure, the level of generality at which the risk is articulated will affect the probability. There was a virtual certainty that “something bad” would happen at 1430 K Street, a much *1564lower probability that a rapist would stop the elevator at the ninth floor and yank Ms. Doe off to rape her. But the Hand formula supplies some automatic correction against manipulation of the level of generality. If the plaintiff articulates the risk very broadly, the cost of prevention will rise to astronomic levels, tending to justify the defendant’s conduct; if the defendant characterizes the risk very narrowly, the cost of prevention will fall, tending to render his level of care unreasonable.
Similarly, in the proximate cause inquiry, the requisite level of foreseeability flows from the nature of the rule: an accident is “unforeseeable” if it is so improbable that, even if actors are held liable for negligence that is a “but for” cause, they will not adjust their level of care in light of the expected liability; the gains in diminished liability are not worth thinking the problem through. See William M. Landes & Richard A. Posner, The Economic Structure of Tort Law 246 (1987); Palsgraf v. Long Island R. Co., 248 N.Y. 339, 162 N.E. 99 (1928). As with the level of care inquiry, the degree of improbability derives from the purpose behind the rule.
Indeed, it seems quite conceivable that the old rule against liability for the criminal acts of third persons may have rested on an implicit judgment that crimes that could be prevented through the reasonable care of someone other than the perpetrator and victim were so flukey that liability would not affect levels of care. In other words, it may have represented a kind of categorical application of the intuition underlying the proximate cause requirement.
Here, however, it is not apparent how any particular degree of foreseeability flows from the requirement’s role in determining liability. As Judge Ginsburg’s excellent opinion indicates, most of the elements that would be relevant to considering probability for standard-of-care purposes, — the character of the building and of the neighborhood, the condition of the premises, past occurrences of comparable events — are all thrown into the equation. Indeed, the only standard-of-care issue that seems to be excluded is the cost of prevention. To include that would completely collapse the two inquiries.
Until the District of Columbia Court of Appeals says otherwise, it seems reasonable to see the foreseeability requirement as a vestige of the blanket rule against liability for the criminal acts of third parties. Though framed as an issue relating to “duty”, it seems, so far as landlord liability for criminal acts in areas under his control is concerned, to perform no analytical work, but merges with the proximate cause analysis. In other contexts, of course, the duty requirement presumably continues to bar liability for the criminal acts of third parties.