Court Opinion

ID: 9497582
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 16:54:45.779955+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:58:16.789726
License: Public Domain

CALABRESI, Circuit Judge,
concurring.
This case presents a simple fact pattern' — a slip-and-fall on a sidewalk outside a restaurant — but implicates complex, and longstanding, issues concerning circumstantial evidence. With that in mind, while I readily concur in the opinion of the Court, I write separately to provide some analysis on the key substantive question underlying this appeal: What does the law of torts tell us about the amount and type of circumstantial evidence that plaintiffs must adduce, in different circumstances, in order to reach a jury?
I.
A review of the doctrine reveals three (closely related) areas in which this sort of determination has proven difficult:
1. There is sufficient evidence that defendant caused plaintiffs injury. Whether the defendant was negligent in doing so, however, is uncertain. This is the situation in which the notion of res ipsa loquitur was first articulated in the 1863 case of Byrne v. Boadle, 159 Eng. Rep. 299 (1863).2
*4232. There is sufficient evidence that plaintiff was injured on account of negligence. But it is an open question whether that negligence was the defendant’s or was, instead, someone else’s. See, e.g., Ybarra v. Spangard, 25 Cal.2d 486, 154 P.2d 687 (1944).
3. The evidence that a particular defendant was negligent is clearly sufficient, as is the evidence that the defendant’s acts or activities were implicated in the plaintiffs injury. But the question of whether it was defendant’s negligence— rather than just some non-negligent act of the defendant’s, or some actions of another party, including the plaintiff— that caused the injury is up for grabs.3
II.
In recent years, all three of these areas have generally been framed in terms of the sufficiency of the circumstantial evidence; *424that is, if the evidence of A is sufficient, can a jury find, by common experience, that B is more probable than not? But in fact, to understand these cases, one must examine three separate considerations.

A. Consideration One: Strength of Circumstantial Evidence

The first is the straight circumstantial evidence inquiry-how strong is the evidence and how decisively does it tilt us toward accepting the plaintiffs allegations? In res ipsa cases, for example, courts look for “a basis of past experience which reasonably permits the conclusion that such events do not ordinarily occur unless someone has been negligent.” Restatement (Second) of Torts § 328D cmt. c (1965). See also W. Keeton, D. Dobbs, R. Keeton & D. Owen, Prosser and Keeton on Law of Torts § 39, at 243 (5th ed.1984) (hereinafter “Prosser and Keeton”) (indicating that the key to res ipsa is a reasonable inference, “based upon the evidence given, together with a sufficient background of human experience to justify the conclusion”).4 Thus, the “fall of an elevator” or the “explosion of boilers” provides a stronger case for finding negligence on the basis of circumstantial evidence than does “[t]he fact ... that a man falls down stairs.” Restatement (Second) of Torts § 328D cmt. c.5

B. Consideration Two: Relative Knowledge of the Parties

The second is an inquiry into which of the parties is in a better position either to reveal or to seek out explanatory evidence. (Such evidence can be direct or circumstantial, but in most cases the focus will be on teasing out direct evidence). This consideration is often cast in terms of which side has more knowledge and therefore which side should bear the incentive to come forward with the evidence. See Griffon v. Manice, 166 N.Y. 188, 59 N.E. 925, 925 (1901) (the doctrine of res ipsa is partly premised on the fact that the defendant has the ability to “produce evidence of the actual cause that produced the accident, which the plaintiff is unable to present.”). In this regard, some states have added a requirement to the traditional res ipsa doctrine that the relevant evidence be more accessible to defendants. See, e.g., Wilson v. Stilwill, 411 Mich. 587, 309 N.W.2d 898, 905 (1981) (listing this element as one requirement); Bass v. Nooney Co., 646 S.W.2d 765, 768 (Mo.1983) (same); Goedert v. Newcastle Equip. Co., 802 P.2d 157, 160 (Wyo.1990) (same). Other commentators and courts, however, *425have understandingly been- reluctant to make this aspect a requirement additional to that of sufficient circumstantial evidence of negligence. See 1 Stuart M. Speiser, The Negligence Case: Res Ipsa Loquitur § 2:27 n. 15 (1972) (collecting cases); Pros-ser and Keeton § 39, at 254-55; Restatement (Second) of Torts § 328D cmt. k (1965).6 Although it may be that this consideration is seldom controlling, see Pros-ser and Keeton § 39, at 254, it does, as we will see, still have important “persuasive effect” in certain circumstances, id. at 255.

C. Consideration Three: Symmetry of Error Costs

The third is an inquiry into how strongly we feel about making an error in one direction as against the other. That is to say, were we erroneously to find that the evidence was sufficient to reach a jury, would that be as, less, or more harmful than if we were erroneously to find that the evidence was in sufficient? In res ipsa cases in particular, this is sometimes improperly described in terms of how close or how far we are from strict liability. But that is just one manifestation of the question. In Judson, for example, the court was concerned with the prospect of erroneously leaving the plaintiffs’ injuries uncompensated. See 40 P. at 1021. In traditional medical malpractice cases, by contrast, there was a concern that even when the circumstantial evidence is relatively strong, holding a doctor liable could prove pretty tough medicine to swallow. See, e.g., Semerjian v. Stetson, 284 Mass. 510, 187 N.E. 829, 831 (1933) (holding that “res ipsa loquitur is not applicable” where a physician placed á liquid substance on the plaintiffs eye, and the eye immediately thereafter became inflamed and pained, and the plaintiff eventually lost all sight in that eye, because “it could not be said that” the plaintiffs condition would not have existed except for negligence). Ultimately, an assessment of the adequacy of the circumstantial evidence was driven in part by a court’s intuition about which side should bear the costs of a mistaken assessment as to the strength of that evidence.
III.
With these considerations in mind, I return to the three broad types of cases— which I identified at the outset — where the circumstantial evidence problem has consistently troubled reviewing courts. In all three areas, the trend has been in the direction of easing the burden on plaintiffs, and courts now more readily permit such cases to get to a jury. But the trend has not developed uniformly in the three areas.

A. Whether There Is Negligence

The move toward jury determinations happened first and most easily, in the Nineteenth Century, as to the question of whether there was negligence on the part of a defendant who caused plaintiffs injury. While this may seem surprising, it is, in fact, historically understandable because the concept of a defendant’s liability based on fault is much less rooted in the common law than the notion that a defendant’s liability presupposes some harm actually caused by the defendant. As an anthropological matter, fault — as a requirement for liability — was a relatively new notion in the nineteenth century.7 By contrast, cau*426sation has been “a well-recognized and essential element of the plaintiffs case in chief’ since at least the early 17th century, see Zuchowicz, 140 F.3d at 384 n. 2, and probably much, much before.8
It is certainly true, however, that the traditional res ipsa formulation called for defendants to be in control. And one might suppose that the “exclusive control” test attempted to mitigate errors in assessing the sufficiency of the circumstantial evidence. Lack of control increases the chances that the accident occurred in an unusual way, rather than through ordinary, and hence circumstantially expected, negligence. More important, however, control implicates causation, and assures that it was the defendant’s circumstantially inferred negligence that brought about the harm.
But if either of these were behind the control requirement, the necessity of exclusive control would be overkill. For in torts, plaintiffs need only to prove both that the defendant was negligent, and that negligence caused the harm complained of, more probably than not. Thus, the certainty of causation that exclusive control seems to entail is not generally needed. I therefore believe that the traditional res ipsa approach to “control” rested on the intuition that if a defendant had exclusive control, the defendant was likely to have superior knowledge, and hence even in the absence of strong circumstantial evidence, could explain the accident. In such circumstances, it is easy to explain courts’ inclination to allow juries to determine whether defendants were negligent, based on the second consideration — knowledge and information — rather than on the first or third. Consider, for example, Kanter v. St. Louis, Springfield & Peoria R.R., 218 Ill.App. 565 (1920), in which the plaintiff secured a judgment at trial against the defendant railroad company for damages arising from a train derailment that cost the plaintiffs husband his life. The trial court originally used traditional res ipsa notions to push the defendant, who was in sole control, to bring forth evidence as to what happened in the, at the time, unexplained accident. The defendant thereupon demonstrated that “the derailment and death of deceased was the result of acts of vandalism committed by persons unknown” and not the fault of the railroad. Id. But plaintiff ultimately won because on the facts shown by the defendant, a jury could conclude that a careful defendant would have seen the defect which caused the derailment in time to avoid harm. Id.
Control, as a surrogate for knowledge, had done its job, even in the absence of strong circumstantial evidence. For who could truly say in 1921, from common experience, that railroad derailments occur more probably than not, due to the railroad’s fault? In light of the role “control” plays in cases like Kanter, it should not be surprising that, as the focus on relative knowledge has become more self-conscious, see supra nn. 4-5, and as the requirements as to causation have eased, see *427infra Part III.C, the necessity for actual exclusive control has also diminished.9 See majority opinion at Part II.B.l.

B. Identifying The Negligent Party

The next area to move imthe direction of jury determination was the question of who was negligent when the evidence was sufficient to establish that an- injury: had occurred on account of someone’s negligence. One-might think that this question posed the most difficulties because, after all, in these cases, the defendant may well have played no.role whatsoever in causing the injury. And yet a rule emerged at mid~20th-century whereby plaintiffs could get to a jury if they could show, more probably than not, that their injury was caused by negligence, even though they possessed no direct evidence as to which of several possible parties acted negligently. A classic example was the situation in which defendant’s car, parked on-the side of the hill, rolled down the hill and injured the plaintiff hours after the defendant had parked the car. The plaintiff could not directly demonstrate that the defendant was negligent — perhaps it was a “tampering stranger,” see Prosser and Keeton § 39, at 249 — yet courts generally permitted these cases to reach a jury. Cf. Roberts v. Ray, 45 Tenn.App. 280, 322 S.W.2d 435, 437-38 (1959).
Multiple defendants were a similar, if more complicated, affair. Only in certain circumstances, generally when the group of defendants were in control, 'or had greater knowledge than the plaintiff, have courts proven willing to allow a jury to determine which among several defendants was the negligent party. In the famous case of Ybarra v. Spangard, 25 Cal.2d 486, 154 P.2d 687 (1944), for example, the plaintiff allegedly received certain injuries during surgery that seemed clearly to be the result of negligence. Because he was unconscious he could not identify the responsible party. Id. at 689. The court held that “where a plaintiff receives- unusual injuries while unconscious and in the course of medical treatment, all those defendants who had any control over his body or the instrumentalities which might have caused the injuries -may properly be called upon to meet the -inference of negligence by giving an explanation of their conduct.” Id. at 691.10
Several jurisdictions have adopted the Ybarra approach, in the medical context and occasionally in others. Thus, in Stone v. Courtyard Mgmt. Corp., 353 F.3d 155, 160 (2d Cir.2003), we concluded: “It is impossible for the plaintiff to say which of the[ ] two defendants was at fault in this case (if either), but that is precisely why New York law allows plaintiff to employ the res ipsa loquitor inference against each defendant and let them explain what happened.” Id. at 160. See also Schroeder v. City & County Sav. Bank of Albany, 293 N.Y. 370, 57 N.E.2d 57, 59 (1944); but see Barrett v. Emanuel Hosp., 64 Or.App. *428635, 669 P.2d 835, 838 (1983) (noting that Ybarra’s goals could “be achieved in various direct ways which may warrant societal consideration ... [but] we do not think the objective should be pursued by stretching a permissible inference beyond the point where there are underlying facts other than the result from which it can reasonably be drawn”).
Ybarra, whatever its merits, provides important insight into the considerations at play in determining who is negligent once negligence has been established. That the plaintiff in Ybarra was injured on account of negligence, or that a jury could readily have so found, was, to the Ybarm court, a very significant fact. As a result, the court focused on the third consideration — that an “insufficiency” error in favor of a defendant might work a greater injustice — result in a greater cost misallo-cation — -than a “sufficiency” error in favor of the plaintiff. Of course, the second consideration was not absent from the analysis; the court relied in part on the fact that certain types of evidence — such as that going to who did wrong — at issue in Ybarm are “practically accessible to [defendants] but inaccessible to the injured person.” 154 P.2d at 689 (internal quotes and citations omitted).11 But, in the end, the intuition driving the California rule seemed to be that in its absence a patient who suffered “permanent injuries of a serious character, obviously the result of some one’s negligence, would be entirely unable to recover unless the doctors and nurses in attendance voluntarily chose to disclose the identity of the negligent person and the facts establishing liability.” Id. That, the court concluded, would be a “gross injustice.” Id. To put it another way, an error leaving the loss on the plaintiff would be more serious than one that placed the loss incorrectly on some of the parties in the group responsible for the operation. Id.12
This movement more readily to send to a jury cases in which the plaintiff lacks direct evidence of the particular defendant’s negligence is, of course, a limited *429one.13 Nevertheless, Ybarra’s bottom-line instinct about an “injustice” to the negligently injured plaintiff, readily shared in other jurisdictions, often shapes the amount of circumstantial evidence of individual wrongdoing that courts demand in this context.

C. Causation

The area in which there was the most persistent reluctance to send cases to the jury was the third: where the evidence that the defendant was negligent was sufficient, but where the evidence that the plaintiff was injured on account of that negligence was seemingly weak.14 That is, situations in which it often was not clear whether (1) negligent behavior (2) of the defendant was a cause of the injury. Only recently has a consensus developed that such cases should go to a jury upon a relatively light showing by the plaintiff of but for causation. Interestingly, courts in this context have focused not so much on the question of knowledge or access to information, or of “bias” for or against liability, as on the first consideration— whether the circumstantial evidence of- but for cause is strong enough. Specifically, did defendant’s negligent actions significantly increase the chances that the injury at issue Would occur?
The first significant movement in the direction of letting this type of case go to a jury came as early as 1920, when Judge Cardozo articulated a highly significant causation test in Martin v. Herzog, 228 N.Y. 164, 126 N.E. 814 (1920).15 Martin involved a nighttime collision between two vehicles, one of which was operating without the headlights required by law. *430Judge Cardozo pointed out that lights had been mandated precisely to avoid the risk of such accidents. As a consequence, it could be inferred that the negligent absence of lights was in fact a cause of the accident. The burden therefore shifted to the defendant to demonstrate that some other element had been responsible for the particular crash in question. We have characterized Judge Cardozo’s general formulation as follows: If (1) a negligent act “was deemed wrongful because that act increased the chances that a particular type of accident would occur,” and (2) “a mishap of that very sort did happen, this was enough to support a finding by the trier of fact that the negligent behavior caused the harm.” Zuchowicz, 140 F.3d at 390 (emphasis omitted).
But Martin did not settle the debate. Some New York courts, as well as some in other jurisdictions, proved reluctant to accept such circumstantial evidence as sufficient in these sorts of cases. Such judges continued to fret over the logical fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc (“after this, therefore, because of this”), and persisted in demanding direct evidence of causation. See, e.g., Wolf v. Kaufmann, 227 A.D. 281, 237 N.Y.S. 550, 551 (N.Y.App.Div.1929) (denying recovery for death of plaintiffs decedent, who was found unconscious at foot of stairway which, in violation of a statute, had been left unlighted by the defendant, because the plaintiff had offered no proof of “any causal connection between the accident and the absence of light”).
Over time, however, the Martin view came to hold sway. In Clark v. Gibbons, 66 Cal.2d 399, 58 Cal.Rptr. 125, 426 P.2d 525 (1967), for example, the California court referred to the “the low incidence of [such] accidents when due care is used ... combined with proof of specific acts of negligence of a type which could have caused the occurrence complained of’ in concluding that a showing on both of these accounts sufficed to permit the case to go to the jury. Id. at 534.16 Today, the broad acceptance of this approach is reflected in and explained by Prosser and Keeton:
And whether the defendant’s negligence consists of the violation of some statutory safety regulation, or the breach of a plain common law duty of care, the court can scarcely overlook the fact that the injury which has in fact occurred is precisely the sort of thing that proper care on the part of the defendant would be intended to prevent, and accordingly allow a certain liberality to the jury in drawing its conclusion.
*431Prosser and Keeton § 41, at 270. See also Guido Calabresi, Concerning Cause and the Law of Torts: An Essay for Harry Kalven, Jr., 43 U. Chi. L.Rev. 69, 71-73 (1975) (examining the three requirements for establishing that the violation of a safety regulation — or for that matter, the contravention of any duty — was a legal “cause” of a plaintiffs injury).
To date, in the causation context, the critical inquiry has seemed to be less focused on who has the most knowledge, or whom the court is inclined to protect from errors. Rather, it has been whether the circumstantial evidence is strong enough. Most of the cases in this area that have relaxed the plaintiffs proof requirements have involved fact patterns where it is reasonable to infer from the available evidence that the defendant’s negligent acts were in fact a but for cause of the injury at issue. They have, for the most part, been cases in which the harm that occurred is precisely the harm that the community would expect to occur given a certain negligent action. See, e.g., Liriano v. Hobart Corp., 170 F.3d 264, 271 (2d Cir.1999) (“When a defendant’s negligent act is deemed wrongful precisely because it has a strong propensity to cause the type of injury that ensued, that very causal tendency is evidence enough to establish a prima fade case of cause-in-fact.”). On the other hand, where that inference cannot so easily be drawn — that is, where that expectation is less clear and the circumstantial evidence therefore weaker — many courts continue to remain reluctant to allow the causation question to reach a jury. That said, the other two strands or factors — relative knowledge, and asymmetry in the significance of error — are not absent in this area either. They seem certainly to have played a role in cases like Clark and Zuchoivicz, and may well come in time to be as significant in this context as they are in the other two.17 All three factors are, after all, as relevant in this context as they are in the areas in which they have already come to play an important role.
rv.
Having examined the treatment of circumstantial evidence in various areas of tort law, we are left with the question: In which category does the ease before us belong? What makes the instant case difficult is that the evidence that the plaintiff was injured on account of negligence, while énough to get to a jury, is just barely so. As the district judge — an eminent and distinguished tort scholar — put it, “although the evidentiary record is scant, it is color-able that a genuine issue of material fact does exist as to whether” there was “grease on the sidewalk where she fell at the time of the accident.” [A 211], Once that has been established, the case seems to fit into the second category — whose negligence was it? 18
*432The case thus bears resemblance, as the majority opinion notes, to Schneider v. Kings Highway Hosp. Center, 67 N.Y.2d 743, 500 N.Y.S.2d 95, 490 N.E.2d 1221 (1986), in which plaintiffs decedent, an elderly hospital patient, fell out of her bed because the side rails had been lowered. There was no question that whoever lowered'the rails had committed a negligent act, and that the negligent act was a cause of the resulting injury. The critical inquiry there, as here, centered on whether the negligent party was the defendant or someone else. On the court’s view, the lack of direct evidence of who raised or lowered the rails was not fatal to the plaintiffs case: “Although plaintiff may in her attempt to meet that burden include proof tending to negate the significance of other possible causes, we have on numerous occasions upheld or reinstated a jury’s verdict where the logic of common experience itself, as applied to the circumstances shown by the evidence, led to the conclusion that defendant’s negligence was the cause of plaintiffs injury.” See id. at 1221 (internal citation omitted).
Here, the logic of common experience tends to support allowing this case to go to a jury. It is clear from the record that KFC is the most likely spiller of grease.19 Despite the district court’s emphasis on the number of necessary inferences, the basic question a fact-finder must answer is a simple one: given that this patch of sidewalk is traversed by a dumpster with garbage bags full of greasy refuse, could a reasonable factfinder conclude that KFC is the source of the grease on the sidewalk? Like the rest of the panel, I believe that under New York law, the answer is yes. KFC rolled its dumpsters from a “dirty” area behind the restaurant, across the relevant patch of sidewalk, and to the street. Those dumpsters contained bags holding the remains of greasy food. Those bags occasionally “burst.” What is more, there is no other clearly plausible candidate for this negligent act. Thus, the other potential explanations are “sufficiently remote [and] technical to enable the jury to reach its verdict based” upon something other than speculation. Id. (internal quotation marks omitted); see also Johnson v. New York City Transit Auth., 129 A.D.2d 424, 513 N.Y.S.2d 687 (NY.App.Div.1987) (citing Schneider and relying on circumstantial evidence to reverse the dismissal of a case where plaintiff had been injured by a flying object that appeared to come from defendant’s subway train passing by overhead).
All in all, given the strength of the circumstantial evidence in this case, the relative capacity of the parties to explain how the offending grease got on the sidewalk, and the absence of any reason to prefer erring in favor of KFC rather than the plaintiff, I am convinced that the result we reach today is not only mandated by New York law but is also consistent with the modern doctrinal trends at the complicated intersection of circumstantial evidence and tort law.

. Scott v. London & St. Katherine Docks Co., decided two years after Boadle, contains a more precise articulation of the doctrine:
*423There must be reasonable evidence of negligence. But where the thing is sh[o]wn to be under the management of the defendant or his servants, and the accident is such as in the ordinary course of things does not happen if those who have the management use proper care, it affords reasonable evidence, in the absence of explanation by the defendants, that the accident arose from want of care,
159 Eng. Rep. 665, 667 (1865).
Nearly every American jurisdiction has embraced some version of the doctrine of res ipsa loquitur. American courts traditionally required proof of. at least three elements to trigger the doctrine: (1) the event is not one that would normally occur in the absence of negligence; (2) the event was caused by an instrumentality within the defendant’s exclusive control; and (3) the plaintiff has not voluntarily contributed to the event.
The Restatement does not call for exclusive control over the instrumentality, see Restatement (Second) of Torts § 328D (1965), and some states have similarly expressly omitted this requirement. See Matthew R. Johnson, Note, Rolling the "Barrel” a Little Further, 38 Wm. & Mary L.Rev. 1197, 1202-04 (1997) (describing the various American approaches to the doctrine of res ipsa loquitur). Even those which nominally maintain the exclusive control rule, often do not apply it as a rigid concept, and rather say that it is "subordinated to its general purpose, that of indicating that it probably was the defendant's negligence which caused the accident." Corcoran v. Banner Super Mkt., Inc., 19 N.Y.2d 425, 280 N.Y.S.2d 385, 227 N.E.2d 304, 306 (1967). See also W. Keeton, D. Dobbs, R. Keeton & D. Owen, Prosser and Keeton on Law of Torts § 39, at 250 (5th ed.1984) (" 'Control,' if it is not to be pernicious and misleading, must be a very flexible term.”).

. See, e.g., Zuchowicz v. United States, 140 F.3d 381 (2d Cir.1998), where the evidence was sufficient to support a finding that a specific drug caused the plaintiff's disease, and where the defendant negligently prescribed an overdose of the drug to the plaintiff, but where it was not clear that the overdose — as against a proper dose of the drug— was the cause of plaintiff's malady. In Zu-chowicz, we described this third area as follows: "To put it more precisely — the defendant’s negligence was strongly causally linked to the accident, and the defendant was undoubtedly a but for cause of the harm, but does this suffice to allow a fact finder to say that the defendant's negligence was a but for cause?” Id. at 390.
This third area often is treated as including not only cases in which a defendant's affirmative act, whether negligent or not, contributed to an injury (for example, the defendant’s prescribing drugs to the plaintiff in Zuchow-icz ), but also situations where the defendant’s passive involvement in an accident — such as the ownership of a staircase, upon which the plaintiff slips, falls, and injures himself — is implicated in the accident. It includes situations, in other words, in which there is some negligence by the defendant — for example, the failure to light the staircase — but there is no direct evidence that that negligence was a cause of the plaintiff's injury. In both scenarios, we cannot be certain that the defendant's negligent behavior, as opposed to the defendant’s otherwise-innocent relationship to the accident, together with some other party's actions, resulted in the plaintiff's injuries. To put it more starkly, we lack direct evidence on two crucial issues: (1) that defendant caused plaintiff’s injury, and (2) that plaintiff was injured as a result of negligence.

. Whether the inference may properly be drawn "is often a matter of the details of the evidence.” Prosser and Keeton § 39, at 247. And in some cases, even where a basis of common knowledge or human experience is lacking, "expert testimony may provide a sufficient foundation.” Id.

. Or, as a New York court stated in the century-old case of Kaiser v. Latimer: "But as such negligence may be proved by the circumstances attending the accident, or the loss of the goods, so it may also be proved by the mere accident itself, if the accident is of such a character as to raise a presumption of negligence.” 40 A.D. 149, 151, 57 N.Y.S. 833 (N.Y.App.Div.1899).
An illustration of this is found in Judson v. Giant Powder Co., in which the court confronted a nitroglycerine explosion in a dynamite factory:
Appellant was engaged in the manufacture of dynamite. In the ordinary course of things, an explosion does not occur in such manufacture if proper care is exercised. An explosion did occur, Ergo, the real cause of the explosion being unexplained, it is probable that it was occasioned by a lack of proper care. The logic is unassailable, and the principle of law of presumptions of fact erected thereon is as sound as the logic upon which it is based.
107 Cal. 549, 40 P. 1020, 1023 (1895).

. Even when a court, in applying res ipsa, does not explicitly emphasize the defendant’s relatively superior knowledge of the events leading to the plaintiff’s injury, an emphasis on defendant’s control — and most clearly, “exclusive” control — over the accident scene implicitly serves the same goals. See infra Part III.A (discussing this relationship).

. See generally Charles O. Gregory, Trespass to Negligence to Absolute Liability, hi Va. L.Rev. 359 (1951) (discussing the historical *426pedigrees of fault and no-fault liability regimes). Many scholars trace the American requirement of fault in cases of direct injury to plaintiffs by defendants to the 1850 opinion of Brown v. Kendall, 60 Mass (6 Cush.) 292 (1850). And English courts did not embrace fault in such situations until Baron Bramwell's opinion in Holmes v. Mather, 10 Ex. 261 (1875). See also Zuchowicz v. United States, 140 F.3d 381, 384 n. 1 (2d Cir.1998).

. An analysis of cause figured in famous trespass actions such as Weaver v. Ward, Hobart 134, 80 Eng. Rep. 28 (K.B.1617), and Gibbons v. Pepper, 1 Ray. 38, 91 Eng. Rep. 922 (K.B. 1695). The action in trespass, and especially trespass vi et annis, along with the later action of trespass on the case, are generally regarded as the ancestors of the modem personal injury suit.

. See Colmenares Vivas v. Sun Alliance Ins. Co., 807 F.2d 1102, 1106-07 (1st Cir.1986). As Judge Bownes recognized in Colmenares, the modem trend has been toward a more relaxed analysis of "exclusivity," one asking whether the defendant, as opposed to a third party, is likely, by virtue of a close (though perhaps not truly exclusive) relationship to the accident, to have relatively superior knowledge regarding the accident’s cause.

. See also Clark v. Gibbons, 66 Cal.2d 399, 58 Cal.Rptr. 125, 426 P.2d 525 (1967), where the issue was more whether evidence of negligence was sufficient, than, if it was, whether the jury could hold all the independent participants in an operation liable, and where the court said, "Of course, negligence and connecting defendant with it, like other facts, can be proved by circumstantial evidence." Id. at 409, 58 Cal.Rptr. 125, 426 P.2d 525 (emphasis added) (quotes and citations omitted).

. Indeed, a New York case from the same period focused almost exclusively on the knowledge element. In Schroeder v. City and County Sav. Bank of Albany, 293 N.Y. 370, 57 N.E.2d 57 (1944), three defendants — the building owner and two contractors — were sued by a plaintiff injured by the collapse of a street barricade around the building. None of the three defendants put forth any evidence explaining the accident. After receiving a res ipsa loquitor instruction, the jury found all three defendants guilty; but the trial court set aside that verdict as against the two contractors because it considered the building owner to be the only party with sufficient "control” over the premises. The New York Court of Appeals, in reversing the trial court's decision and ordering a new trial for the two contractors, made clear that "control” was not limited to ownership or supervision, but was instead a proxy — and a loose one — for knowledge:
[TJhree defendants either simultaneously or in necessary rotation, with nondelegable supervision always remaining in the Bank, were in possession of the instrumentality which caused the injuries to plaintiff. None of the three defendants put in any defense. They were the ones who knew the cause of the collapse. It is not necessary for the applicability of the res ipsa loquitur doctrine that there be but a single person in control of that which caused the damage. Where, as here, one or some or all of three interdependent defendants are in control and burdened with supervision of a street barricade, it is for them to explain their action and conduct when it collapses with resultant damage to another.
Id. at 59.

. Prosser and Keeton put it this way: “The basis of the decision appears quite definitely to have been the special responsibility for the plaintiff’s safety undertaken by everyone concerned.” Prosser and Keeton § 39, at 252-53.

. Prosser and Keeton note that there are still many instances where res ipsa loquitor is not applied "against multiple defendants, where it is inferable that only one has been negligent.” Prosser and Keeton § 39, at 253. And if either relative knowledge, or the relative gravity of burdening the innocent plaintiff as against one or another innocent defendant, is what drives the Ybarra line of cases, such reluctance to apply Ybarra across the board is easily understood. It is only in some group defendant cases that either the requisite knowledge, or the “bias” in favor of liability, is present. See, e.g., Dement v. Olin-Mathieson Chemical Corp., 282 F.2d 76, 80-81 (5th Cir.1960).

. While the reluctance to send cases of this third sort to juries may at first glance seem strange, it is, in fact, fairly easily explainable. The first set of cases involved sufficient evidence of defendant causation, and only defendant's negligence was in doubt. The second were all cases in which plaintiff was adequately shown to have been injured because of negligence (and therefore, perhaps, to "deserve” compensation) and only the question of whether the defendant was the negligent party was unclear. The last set of cases— while it involves defendant negligence — leaves open both the question of whether the plaintiff was injured as a result of negligence (and hence “deserves” compensation), and that of whether the defendant, albeit negligent, was a cause of the harm (and hence, in a sense, "deserves” to pay). In this respect, these cases can be readily distinguished from the line of cases that very early led to recovery. These were the "hunter” cases, mentioned at note 16 infra, in which there was no doubt as to (1) the fact that each of several defendants were negligent and (2) that negligence was the cause of plaintiffs injury. In these cases only which defendant’s negligence caused the harm was unclear.

. There is, in fact, a much earlier and even broader example. See Reynolds v. Texas & Pac. R. Co., 37 La. Ann. 694 (La.1885) (recognizing that, despite "the distinction between post hoc and propter hoc," where a defendant’s negligent behavior "greatly multiplies the chances of accident to the plaintiff, and is of a character naturally leading to its occurrence, the mere possibility that it might have happened without the negligence is not sufficient to break the chain of cause and effect between the negligence and the injury” so long as the "whole tendency” of the circumstantial evidence "connects the accident with the negligence”).

. A recent example in New York is the case of Gayle v. City of New York, 92 N.Y.2d 936, 680 N.Y.S.2d 900, 703 N.E.2d 758 (1998), cited in the opinion of the district court in the case before us. The plaintiff in Gayle sought to prove that the city’s negligence in maintaining a functional drainage system was the proximate cause of his car accident. The Appellate Division found “many other just as plausible variables and factors which could have caused or contributed to the accident ... none of which were ruled out by the plaintiffs” 247 A.D.2d 431, 668 N.Y.S.2d 693, 696 (N.Y.App.Div.1998), but the Court of Appeals reversed. The high court observed that "[pllaintiffs need not positively exclude ever)' other possible cause of the accident.” 680 N.Y.S.2d 900, 703 N.E.2d at 759. Rather, “upon the logical inferences to be drawn from the evidence,” plaintiffs "need only prove that it was more likely or more reasonable that the alleged injury was caused by the defendant’s negligence than by some other agency.” Id. (internal quotes and citations omitted). On this standard, the court found that the evidence provided a reasonable basis for the jury to conclude that defendant’s negligence proximately caused the accident. Significantly, Gayle, unlike Martin, and like Reynolds, represents a case in which the negligence did not arise from failure to follow a specific statutory prescription, but from the "breach of a plain common law duty of care.” Prosser and Keeton § 41, at 270.

. These factors have also led courts, in other types of cases where "who done it” has been up for grabs, to develop methods for assigning liability where two or more defendants have clearly done something wrong, but where tying their specific action to the plaintiff’s injury proves difficult or impossible. It is here that we find: (1) courts holding all the defendants liable, see, e.g., "the hunter cases,” Summers v. Tice, 33 Cal.2d 80, 199 P.2d 1 (1948) (holding that, where two hunters independently breached a duty to the plaintiff, but there was uncertainty regarding which one caused the plaintiff's injury, both were liable in the absence of sufficient causal evidence as to either defendant), and Cook v. Lewis, 1 D.L.R. 1 (S.Ct.Can.1952) (same), or (2) applying market-share liability, see, e.g., Hymowitz v. Eli Lilly & Co., 73 N.Y.2d 487, 541 N.Y.S.2d 941, 539 N.E.2d 1069 (1989).

. Causation "as a result of” negligence does not pose a problem here, because there is enough evidence that the negligent spillage of grease was a but for cause of the plaintiff’s fall and subsequent injury.

. The instant fact pattern differs from that at issue in Ybarra, and to the plaintiff’s advantage: In Ybaira, several different named defendants were all equally likely to have been the negligent party.