All first year law students who study the tort of negligence spend a great deal of time attempting to understand the concept of legal duty. A defendant is not liable for an injury in negligence unless there has been some breach of a duty owed to the plaintiff. The scope of duty is limited to those risks which are “reasonably foreseeable.” This case discusses the concept of forseeability, and uses it to define the scope of the legal duty a motor vehicle operator owes to a municipal employee repairing a damaged traffic light.
The defendant truck driver negligently damaged a traffic light in the city of Lebanon. The city dispatched an employee to repair the light, and the plaintiff employee was injured when he removed the damaged light from the pole during the repair process, and bore the full force of the heavy fixture on one arm and shoulder. While the defendant’s employer paid for the cost of damages to the traffic light, it denied liability for the city employee’s injuries. At the trial court level, the Superior Court granted summary judgment to the trucking company on the ground that no truck driver could reasonably foresee that damage to a traffic light could result in injury to a repairman’s shoulder resulting from bearing the weight of the heavy fixture on one arm and shoulder.
The injured employee appealed and the Supreme Court affirmed the trial court’s decision. When a person commits a negligent act, the person is not legally responsible for all of the consequences that might conceivably flow from the act. Instead, the liability is limited to those consequences that might reasonably have been foreseen at the time of the act.
If this concept seems difficult to understand, take heart. It has confounded several generations of law students since first announced by Justice Cardozo in the New York Court of Appeals in 1928. The important thing to remember is that the extent of liability for something that goes wrong is not unlimited, but instead is held in check by the public policy that it is unfair to hold a person liable for an injury that could not reasonably have been anticipated to result from the underlying wrongful behavior.