Court Opinion

ID: 9480513
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 07:50:09.854491+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:47:44.173012
License: Public Domain

POSNER, Circuit Judge,
dissenting.
It is natural to want to give short shrift to a small case. The district judge succumbed to the temptation, embodying the findings of fact that Rule 52(a) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure required him to make in an unedited oral opinion that neither demonstrates that he performed his proper function as the trier of fact nor provides an adequate predicate for our performance of the appellate function.
There were two versions of what happened here. The plaintiff’s, Mrs. Wyle-tal’s, was that she was walking on the sidewalk nine feet from the row of storefronts from which the defendant’s postman, Mr. Plost, emerged and that he walked into her, presumably at right angles although her impression was of being struck in the back. Plost’s version of the accident was that Mrs. Wyletal was hugging the storefronts and walked into him as he stepped out from a recessed doorway, his view of her blocked by the angle that the recess made with the inner part of the sidewalk. If her version is correct, Plost was negligent and she was not, and she is entitled to 100 percent of her damages. If his version was correct, she was negligent and Plost not, and she is entitled to noth: ing.
The district judge was unable to make up his mind whom to believe. “I’ll tell you, I haven’t been able to reconcile, given the conflicting testimony, how this accident *52happened other than the fact that both people were equally negligent.” But if he couldn’t figure out how the accident had happened, he couldn’t determine their relative negligence. What is more, there were only two versions of the accident, and in neither were the parties equally negligent. The judge seems just to have thrown up his hands in despair of being able to find the facts in this case.
It might not be a bad rule to discount an award of damages by the probability that the plaintiff was really entitled to the award. So if a plaintiff’s damages were $100,000, and the trier of fact was 90 percent confident that the plaintiff had in fact been wronged, the plaintiff would be awarded $90,000; and if the trier of fact was only 50 percent confident, $50,000. Something like this is actually done, ■ on occasion, see AMPAT/Midwest, Inc. v. Illinois Tool Works Inc., 896 F.2d 1035, 1044 (7th Cir.1990), and cases cited there; and there are parallels to the way in which courts decide whether to issue a preliminary injunction. American Hospital Supply Corp. v. Hospital Products Ltd., 780 F.2d 589, 593-94 (7th Cir.1986). Another possibility would be to bring back the old admiralty rule and make each party to a collision bear exactly one half the total damages caused by it. The Schooner Catharine v. Dickinson, 58 U.S. (17 How.) 170,15 L.Ed. 233 (1855), overruled by United States v. Reliable Transfer Co., 421 U.S. 397, 95 S.Ct. 1708, 44 L.Ed.2d 251 (1975).
But none of these is an authorized approach to deciding which of two versions of an accident is correct. The approach to that question is given by the rules on burden of proof. The plaintiff in a negligence case has the burden of proving the defendant’s negligence by a preponderance of the evidence, meaning (so far as relevant here) that if the trier of fact is left in equipoise by the evidence bearing on the defendant’s negligence, he must award judgment to the defendant. Should the trier of fact find that the defendant was negligent, the defendant then has the burden of proving, also by a preponderance of the evidence, Casey v. Baseden, 111 Ill.2d 341, 95 Ill.Dec. 531, 490 N.E.2d 4 (1986), that the plaintiff was negligent too. Now we see just how impossible the district judge’s .analysis in this case is. If he really had no clue to who was telling the truth, this would have meant that the plaintiff had failed to move him off dead center, and his judgment should have been for the defendant. If he thought on balance that there was some negligence by the defendant, but remained irremediably irresolute as to the plaintiff’s negligence, he should have awarded the plaintiff all her damages, because the defendant would have failed to establish contributory negligence by a preponderance of the evidence. If he thought that both stories were true, then both parties were negligent and his award of partial damages would be defensible; but if he thought that, he also thought the collision took place in non-Euclidean space.
The likeliest inference is that the judge didn’t think the case worth the care and attention that would be required to decide, with reasonable though of course not complete confidence, what happened. This is an understandable response, since the stakes are modest by the standards of modern federal litigation and the only issues ones of state law.- But it is not a justifiable response. The case was squarely within the jurisdiction of the district court, and would be even if ambitious proposals to overhaul federal jurisdiction were adopted. The federal government will not expose itself to suit in state court, and has a good reason for refusing to do so: a suit by a state resident against the federal government would offer the state court the tempting prospect of being able to shift the costs of the accident from a local constituent to the federal taxpayer at large. Finally, this is not a petty case, fit only for small-claims court. Although the district judge assessed the plaintiff’s damages at only $50,-000, she had a colorable claim to a much greater amount.
And speaking of damages, the $10,000 that the judge awarded for pain and suffering was shockingly small. An 85 year old woman broke her hip and as a result must use a walker to walk, and a bar in the *53bathroom to lift herself from the toilet seat, and she has suffered pain and the aggravation of a bladder condition. As the saying goes, old age is not for sissies; and an 85 year old can expect pain and suffering even if she does not break her hip. But' Mrs. Wyletal is now almost 90, so that the judge’s award comes out to only about $2,000 a year. I am sure she would have paid more than that to have been spared an accident that broke her hip.
She deserves a better shot from the federal courts. I would reverse the judgment and remand to the district court for further findings.