Monday, August 29, 2022

Hoffman v. Young (Cal. Supreme Ct. - Aug. 29, 2022)

I've previously waxed poetic about how the California Supreme Court is really smart, often unanimous, blah blah blah. Maybe the net result is a relatively "boring" state supreme court, but that's a boredom that I can more than tolerate; indeed, one of which I'm often affirmatively proud.

That said, today, there's a split opinion; 4-3 (-ish), even. All of the justices, mind you, agree on the result, which (in this case) is a remand. But how they get there, and their underlying attitude, is slightly different.

The question is whether the landowner here is liable for a dangerous recreational condition on his property (here, a race track). The applicable rule is that, in essence, the landowner is potentially liable if she invited someone onto her property (e.g., a paying customer, a friend you asked to come over, etc.), but not if the landowner merely "permitted" someone to show up -- e.g., just had a trail or racetrack or whatever and let the local teenagers use the thing whenever they wanted.

In this case, we know that if the landowner had personally invited the victim to race on the racetrack, she'd be potentially liable. But what if, as here, the person who invited the victim was instead her 18-year old son, who lived on the property but asked the friend (another teenager) to come over? Same rule?

The Court of Appeal thought that a kid living in the house who invites a friend over is basically the same as the parent herself, but the California Supreme Court said: "Not so fast." Hence the remand.

But there are two competing visions here. The majority opinion, written by Justice Corrigan, views fairly suspiciously the attempt to impose liability. It applies traditional agency principles and says that kids aren't typically "agents" for their parents so it might well not be the "landowner" who gave the invite, and sends the case back down for a more robust evaluation of the facts. But the concurrence, authored by Justice Kruger, agrees with a remand, but is far more plaintiff-friendly, and clearly suggests that there should be liability -- one way or the other -- in a situation like this one. Justice Kruger's concurrence is multifaceted (and incredibly well-written), so an abbreviated version definitely won't do it justice. But here's the basic sense:

"The parties’ core dispute at all stages of this litigation has been whether Gunner’s personal invitation to Mikayla can be attributed to his property-owning parents on some form of agency-law theory, thereby bringing his invitation within the (d)(3) exception for persons invited to the property 'by the landowner.' . . . [But] [t]o employ the language of agency law in the context of filial relations raises questions to which traditional agency principles can supply no clear answers: What does it mean to say a child is the 'authorized agent' of his parent? When can a child’s invitation to a friend be said to have been made on 'behalf' of a parent, who derives no personal gain from the invitation — aside, that is, from the gain that comes from the social benefits to her child? . . . Rather than asking whether a child or other household member acts as a landowner’s 'authorized agent' when he invites a friend over to play — the sort of question we might ask if this were a corporate merger or a real estate deal rather than an ordinary social visit — the common law background to section 846 suggests we might ask, more simply, whether the child was authorized to invite friends over.

A contrary reading of section 846 — one in which only invitations by a landowner or her agent, in the technical, business-oriented sense, suffice for the (d)(3) exception — would generate quite unusual results. The most obvious, and perhaps most troubling, would be that children ordinarily would be without any remedy for injury when friends invite them over to play. We should not lightly attribute that intent to the Legislature, particularly given California’s “strong public policy to protect children of tender years” (People v. Olsen (1984) 36 Cal.3d 638, 646), and particularly when everything we know about the statute suggests it was directed to quite different concerns. . . . The oddities presumably would not stop there. Consider a large multigenerational family occupying property to which just one or two members of the family — say, a daughter and her spouse — formally hold title. The family hosts a backyard social gathering. Two guests — one invited by the daughter and one by a different member of the family — fall onto the same unreasonably dangerous lawn sprinkler while playing a recreational game of soccer, sustaining equally serious injuries. A narrow understanding of what it means for an invitation to be issued 'by the landowner' could grant the daughter’s guest the right to sue for recreational injury, while the other, identically situated guest is left without a remedy — though no obvious reason appears for the difference."

These arguments resonate with me. Very much so. Less, I suspect, with those who sign on to Justice Corrigan's opinion. (Though I'll note that Justice Liu signed on to both opinions, which makes sense at one level but which is also kinda funky on another, since I think the sentiments behind each are fairly disparate.)

I know that what opinion a justice joins depends on a variety of different things, particularly when, as here, the result is the same (a remand) and the doctrinal arguments of each aren't mutually exclusive.

But I personally found myself nodding affirmatively a lot more when I was reading Justice Kruger's opinion than the reluctant "Yeah, okay, I get that, I guess" I was saying to myself when I was reading Justice Corrigan's opinion.

Which is not to say that the latter was wrong.

But I liked the former a lot more, and would definitely have signed on to the thing.