Lead Opinion
Opinion
Two friends went skiing together. One collided with the other, inflicting injury. We must decide whether the injured skier has a valid action
We affirm the judgment of the Court of Appeal, which reached the same conclusion.
I. Facts and Procedural History
The relevant facts are largely undisputed. On April 11, 1991, plaintiff Wilkie Cheong and defendant Drew R. Antablin, longtime friends and experienced skiers, skied together at Alpine Meadows, a resort near Tahoe City in Placer County. They collided, injuring plaintiff. Defendant’s declaration states, “I was skiing faster than I was comfortable with, in that I felt I was skiing too fast for existing conditions. In reaction, I turned to my right in an effort to slow down, regain control and stop. As I did so, we collided.” Defendant denied intentionally colliding with plaintiff or acting recklessly. In his deposition, plaintiff conceded he did not believe defendant acted recklessly.
Plaintiff sued defendant for general negligence. The superior court granted defendant’s motion for summary judgment. The court found that a collision “is an inherent risk of downhill skiing.” It stated that under the analysis of Knight, supra,
Plaintiff appealed. He argued that he and defendant were not coparticipants in the sport within the meaning of Knight and Ford, and that the local
Citing O’Donoghue v. Bear Mountain Ski Resort (1994)
The Court of Appeal also concluded that the local “ordinance did not impose a duty of care upon skiers irrespective of Knight v. Jewett.” We granted plaintiff’s petition to review the issue of the ordinance’s effect.
II. Discussion
In Knight, supra,
We distinguished between (1) primary assumption of risk—“those instances in which the assumption of risk doctrine embodies a legal conclusion that there is ‘no duty’ on the part of the defendant to protect the plaintiff
We noted that “As a general rule, persons have a duty to use due care to avoid injury to others, and may be held liable if their careless conduct injures another person. (See Civ. Code, § 1714.)” (Knight, supra,
For these reasons, the general test is “that a participant in an active sport breaches a legal duty of care to other participants—i.e., engages in conduct that properly may subject him or her to financial liability—only if the participant intentionally injures another player or engages in conduct that is so reckless as to be totally outside the range of the ordinary activity involved in the sport.” (Knight, supra,
Plaintiff argues that the ordinance imposes a higher duty on defendant than Knight establishes. We disagree. We recognize that Knight was a development of the common law of torts. Within constitutional limits, the Legislature may, if it chooses, modify the common law by statute. (E.g., Strang v. Cabrol (1984)
The ordinance evinces no clear intent to modify common law assumption of risk principles. It does state various “skier duties," but in context these duties do not govern tort liability between skiers. Rather than stating a skier may sue a fellow skier for violating the specified duties, the ordinance expressly provides that a skier “shall assume and accept the inherent risks of such activities insofar as the risks are reasonably obvious, foreseeable or necessary to the activities” (Placer Code, § 12.132), and it defines these
Plaintiff also argues that Evidence Code section 669, subdivision (a) (section 669(a)), provides him a cause of action. Section 669(a) states: “The failure of a person to exercise due care is presumed if:
“(1) He violated a statute, ordinance, or regulation of a public entity;
“(2) The violation proximately caused death or injury to person or property;
“(3) The death or injury resulted from an occurrence of the nature which the statute, ordinance, or regulation was designed to prevent; and
“(4) The person suffering the death or the injury to his person or property was one of the class of persons for whose protection the statute, ordinance, or regulation was adopted.”
Citing the four elements of section 669(a), plaintiff contends (1) defendant violated an ordinance, specifically the Placer Code; (2) the violation caused his injury; (3) the ordinance was designed to prevent his injury; and (4) he was one of the class the ordinance was intended to protect. Relying heavily on Ford, supra,
In Ford, the plaintiff was injured when he struck a tree limb extending from a riverbank in a channel of the Sacramento River Delta while water-skiing barefoot and backward. He sued the driver of the boat that towed him.
This court disagreed. The lead opinion, speaking for one justice, concluded Harbors and Navigation Code “section 658, subdivision (d), was intended to safeguard only the lives and property of third persons. Plaintiff does not fall within this protected class. (Evid. Code, § 669.) Accordingly, the statute does not impose a duty of care on defendant that is otherwise precluded under the principles set forth in Knight, supra, ante, at page 296.” (Ford, supra,
Justice Arabian’s opinion in Ford implicitly assumed, and the opinions of Justice George, joined by Chief Justice Lucas, and Justice Mosk expressly concluded, that if the four elements of section 669(a) were satisfied, that statute creates tort liability between coparticipants in an active sport despite the Knight doctrine of primary assumption of risk. As the concurring opinion that I have filed in this case indicates, a number of the justices who have signed this majority opinion question whether this conclusion is correct. We need not resolve the point here, however, because, even if that conclusion is correct, the elements of section 669(a) have not been met in this case. Plaintiff has not demonstrated that he is one of the class of persons the ordinance was intended to protect. By specifically stating that skiers assume the inherent risks of skiing, including the risk of collision and the risk that others will fail to ski within their own ability, the ordinance makes clear that petitioner, who was injured in a collision with a fellow skier, was not “one of the class of persons for whose protection the . . . ordinance . . . was adopted.” (§ 669(a).) Accordingly section 669(a) does not aid plaintiff’s position.
“By eliminating liability for unintended accidents, the doctrine [of primary assumption of the risk] ensures that the fervor of athletic competition
III. Conclusion
The judgment of the Court of Appeal is affirmed.
George, C. J., Baxter, J., Werdegar, J., and Brown, J., concurred.
Concurrence Opinion
I concur in the result.
Participants in an active sport ordinarily have no duty to coparticipants “to refrain from the normal activities of the sport, however unreasonable it would be to inflict such activities on nonparticipants.” (4 Harper et al., The Law of Torts (2d ed. 1986) § 21.3, p. 223.) That is my understanding of the rule adopted in Knight v. Jewett (1992)
The no-duty rule of Knight applies unless it is displaced. For example, the Legislature could enact a statute providing that a coparticipant in a particular active sport owes a duty of care not to engage in particular conduct that might otherwise be considered one of the “normal activities of the sport.” I agree with the Court of Appeal that the ordinance here—the Skier Responsibility Code of Placer County—does not purport to displace the no-duty rule of Knight. On the contrary, it embraces the rule: recreational downhill skiers “assume and accept the inherent risks of [skiing]” (Placer Code, § 12.132), including “collision with other skiers and a skier’s failure to ski within the skier’s own ability.” (Placer Code, § 12.131(a).), Accordingly, plaintiff does not have a cause of action against defendant on the facts presented.
I am not persuaded that the same is true of the statute at issue in Ford v. Gouin (1992)
Finally, I question the suggestion that a local ordinance, as opposed to a rule of statewide application, may not establish a local duty giving rise to tort liability. Again, that depends on whether the particular ordinance or statute displaces the no-duty rule of Knight. The dispositive question is whether it is the type of safety enactment that establishes a duty of “due care” that would otherwise not exist, under Knight.
Notes
Justice Chin’s separate concurring opinion appears to conclude that the presumption of lack of “due care” under Evidence Code section 669 does not affect the Knight rule because “primary assumption of risk” eliminates any duty not to engage in conduct amounting to “simple negligence,” as opposed to conduct that is “intentional” or “reckless.” I do not agree. As I understand our holding in Knight, a coparticipant who engages in a sport according to the rules is not “negligent” at all, even if his conduct is “intentional.” “[P]articipants breach no duty to other participants in playing the sport normally, although the same acts (e.g., tackling someone, or hitting a baseball in his direction) would be negligent, or worse, if they endangered a nonparticipant.” (4 Harper et al., The Law of Torts, supra, § 21.5, p. 238, fn. 17.) If that rule is displaced by a statute or ordinance, a coparticipant who engaged in conduct amounting even to “simple negligence” would indeed violate his legal duty of care, under Evidence Code section 669, unless he did what might reasonably be expected of a person of ordinary prudence, acting under similar circumstances.
Concurrence Opinion
I concur in the result.
In Knight v. Jewett (1992)
In both Knight and Ford, I disagreed with the proposal to discard the traditional doctrine of voluntary assumption of risk. Instead, in both cases I analyzed the issues by applying that doctrine, which holds each person accountable for the normal and expected consequences of a freely chosen course of conduct. (Knight, supra, 3 Cal.4th at pp. 324-338 (dis. opn. of Kennard, J.); Ford, supra, 3 Cal.4th at pp. 351-364 (conc. opn. of Kennard, J., joined by Panelli and Baxter, JJ.).)
This case has given rise to five separate opinions, including a concurring opinion by the author of the majority opinion. The only point on which a majority of this court can agree is that a Placer County skiing ordinance that “preserves common law principles of assumption of risk” (maj. opn., ante, at p. 1070) does not impose a duty on skiers to avoid harm to other skiers. But the conflicting concurring opinions expose the inherent incongruity between the plurality’s proposal in Knight to eliminate a sports participant’s duty of due care and its suggestion in the companion case of Ford that a statutory obligation read together with Evidence Code section 669 could displace Knight’s “no-duty-of-due-care” rule. Under the plurality view in Knight, a sports participant would have no duty to exercise due care toward other sports participants. But Evidence Code section 669, relied on by that same plurality in Ford, creates only a presumption that a person who has violated a statute or ordinance has failed to exercise due care. Thus, if one accepts (as I do not) the soundness of the Knight plurality view that sports participants have no duty to exercise due care, then, as Justice Chin’s concurring opinion in this case points out, it logically follows that a statutory presumption of lack of due care cannot result in liability for a sports participant. (See conc. opn. of Chin, J., post, at p. 1079.)
This case illustrates the extent to which the Knight plurality’s effort to abandon the traditional doctrine of assumption of risk is tearing at the fabric of tort law. Those who accept the underlying premise of the Knight plurality either must conclude that legislatively created duties have no bearing on the tort liability of sports participants or must distort the negligence concept of due care to encompass reckless and intentional conduct.
The majority opinion in this case characterizes as “controlling law” the view expressed by the Knight plurality. (Maj. opn., ante, at p. 1067.) But as I pointed out earlier, that view was embraced by only three justices in Knight and in its companion case, Ford. Although later decisions by this court contain statements reiterating what the three-justice plurality had said in Knight (see Parsons v. Crown Disposal Co. (1997)
Applying that doctrine, I would analyze this case as follows: Defendant Drew R. Antablin collided with plaintiff Wilkie Cheong while the two law partners were skiing together at the Alpine Meadows ski resort in Placer County. Collisions between skiers are so much an expected risk of downhill skiing that Placer County has enacted an ordinance listing it as one of the “[i]nherent risks of skiing.” (Skier Responsibility Code of Placer County,
Evidence Code section 669 provides: “(a) The failure of a person to exercise due care is presumed if: [<ffl (1) He violated a statute, ordinance, or regulation of a public entity; HD (2) The violation proximately caused death or injury to person or property; [H (3) The death or injury resulted from an occurrence of the nature which the statute, ordinance, or regulation was designed to prevent; and flfl (4) The person suffering the death or injury to his person or property was one of the class of persons for whose protection the statute, ordinance, or regulation was adopted.”
Concurrence Opinion
I have joined the majority opinion because I agree generally with its reasoning and concur in the result. The majority correctly observes in order to decide this case we “need not resolve” (maj. opn., ante, at p. 1071) whether or how Evidence Code section 669 (section 669) may affect a plaintiff’s burden of proof in tort litigation generally, or revisit the complex of related issues that led to our fragmented decision in Ford v. Gouin (1952)
Justice Chin implicitly argues that section 669 may never bear on a plaintiff’s burden of proof as to the existence vel non of a tort duty (see conc. opn. of Chin, J., post, at p. 1079 [noting “[t]he word ‘duty’ does not appear in the statute,” and opining section 669 “states a rule of evidence only—a presumption of the failure to use ‘due care’ ”]) and suggests “due care” therein invariably means ordinary care (see ibid, [defining “the general duty to use ‘due care’ ” as the duty to “not act negligently”]).
I am not persuaded. Section 669 codifies the common law doctrine of negligence per se. (Vesely v. Sager (1971)
A plain reading of section 669 suggests the presumption arising thereunder is one of “failure of a person to exercise due care” (§ 669, subd. (a)), i.e., the care that is “due” in the context governed by the relevant “statute, ordinance, or regulation” (id., subd. (a)(1)). Justice Chin apparently sees in section 669’s “location in the Evidence Code” (conc. opn. of Chin, J., post, at p. 1079) support for departing from the statute’s plain language, so as to construe “due care” as “ordinary care,” but I do not. Mere “location of an enactment in one particular code as opposed to another is ‘generally among the least helpful indicia of legislative intent.’ ” (People v. Andrade (1983)
Nor does citation to a terse Law Revision Commission comment persuade me the presumption arising under section 669 “ ‘is one of simple negligence only’ ” (conc. opn. of Chin, J., post, at p. 1079, quoting Cal. Law Revision Com. com., 29B pt. 2 West’s Ann. Evid. Code (1995 ed.) foll. § 669, p. 264), irrespective of the context. The commission’s comment is not explained, and its sole support, a 1931 Court of Appeal opinion, held only that the particular jury instructions in that case, including one stating, “the violation of the speed statute was simple negligence” and “that alone was not sufficient to constitute gross negligence,” were as a whole fair to the defendant. (Taylor v. Cockrell (1931)
For the foregoing reasons, as well as for the reasons stated in the majority opinion, I have joined the majority in rejecting plaintiff’s claim on the grounds it is barred by our decision in Knight, rather than adopt the approach suggested in Justice Chin’s concurring opinion.
George, C. J., concurred.
Concurrence Opinion
Obviously, I concur in the majority opinion I have authored. I write separately to state another reason to reject plaintiff’s argument under Evidence Code section 669, subdivision (a) (section 669(a)). The majority opinion does not decide whether, assuming the four elements of section 669(a) are satisfied, that statute creates tort liability between coparticipants in an active sport notwithstanding our decision in Knight v. Jewett (1992)
As relevant, section 669(a) states, “The failure of a person to exercise due care is presumed if’ four requirements are met. This statute, however, does not establish tort liability. Rather, it merely “codifie[s]” the rule that “a presumption of negligence arises from the violation of a statute which was enacted to protect a class of persons of which the plaintiff is a member against the type of harm which the plaintiff suffered as a result of the violation of the statute.” (Vesely v. Sager (1971)
Primary assumption of risk involves “ ‘ “a reduction of defendant’s duty of care.” ’ ” (Knight, supra,
For these reasons, I would reject plaintiff’s argument under section 669(a) at the outset. That section does not, by itself, modify the Knight rule. The Legislature clearly has the power to modify Knight, but whether a particular statute has done so must be determined from that statute itself, not merely by determining whether the four elements of section 669(a) are met.
The majority opinion also does not decide whether a local ordinance such as the Skier Responsibility Code of Placer County may modify Knight. (Maj. opn., ante, at p. 1069.) Knight established a common law rule for the entire
Baxter, J., and Brown, J., concurred.