Saw this question on another board, and was interested enough to see if the experts here could answer:
John Doe is talking on his cell phone and slams into a Yugo driven by Richard Roe. No one is injured, but Roe has a $1,000,000 Ming vase in his trunk that is not insured for loss or damage, the vase is destroyed. Suppose A) Roe actually owned the vase, or B) he had just stolen it from his employer. Who is liable here?
Probably “Joint and Several” liability, meaning you can sue one or the other, or both.
If there’s a law against cell phone use in a motor vehicle, then Doe is negligent per se and liable automatically unless…
If the vase is stolen, in my state that breaks the chain of proximate causation (this is called an “intervening act”) and nullifies any liability for Doe. Essentially, the law avoids rewarding thieves or other criminals for acts that result from their criminality. As it is said, “where both are guilty, the defendant’s in the better position.” Moreover, since Roe is not the owner of the stolen property, he has no right to recover for its loss.
In ‘A’ the insurer would settle with Roe.
In ‘B’ I am not sure. Roe would have no claim since he wasn’t the owner, but the original owner would have a claim against him as he stole the vase.
I suspect that the winners would be the lawyers as usual.
Assuming that there is no question but that Doe acted negligently, I think he is liable to the vase’s owner for its full value under either case.
Case A strikes me as the classic eggshell plaintiff. If you negligently hit me with force that ordinarily wouldn’t hurt someone but that causes me $100,000 of medical bills because my skull is actually as thin as an eggshell, it is as settled as settled law can get that you’re liable to me for $100,000. As between the two parties, the negligent one bears the risk that damages will be unexpectedly high.
Case B, I think the same result obtains, except that Doe is liable to the vase’s rightful owner. I take the point Hello Again makes about supervening criminal liability, but I don’t think it applies here. The theft itself is criminal, but there’s nothing criminal about putting a vase in a trunk. Put another way, it’s still foreseeable that slamming into another car’s trunk is going to damage whatever property is in there, whether the property is stolen or not. I may be wrong about this.
(By contrast, if Roe had wired his trunk with high explosive, such that Doe’s impact destroyed a whole nearby building, then I don’t think Doe is liable for the costs of the building or any harm to its occupants, because wiring the trunk to explode was a supervening criminal act that caused unforeseeable damage).
Roe could attempt to sue to recover the lossed value of the vase, but he will likely settle for the policy limit on Doe’s insurance, as Doe likely could not pay the full amount and would thus declare bankruptcy. Roe would be carrying the risk by not insuring the vase.
If Roe stole the vase, he would be liable to his (former?) boss for the value of the vase. If Roe is resorting to theft, he likely wouldn’t be able to pay back the value. Hopefully the boss independently insured the vase against theft, otherwise, he’d have to take his chances that either driver’s insurance would partially cover the cost of the vase.
There is confounding factor, that insurance will usually pay only the depreciated value rather than the collector’s value. One could (sleazily) argue a 400 year-old vase has no inherent value anymore, and thus be liable for only a few hundred dollars in compensation. By not independently insuring the collector’s value on the vase, one accepts the risk of loosing the entirety of the vase’s value.
A Yugo that still runs is far more rare than a Ming vase.
This is nonsense. Are you suggesting that my Rembrandt that I paid £20m for is really worthless because it is too old, or maybe because the artist originally sold it for a few Guilders?
Things are worth what people are prepared to pay for them. This is usually the open market value, which stops me claiming for the painting my five-year-old made on the grounds that I gave him £1m for it. Insurers generally pay out on the negotiated market value.
On consideration, I think that in this country at least, the insurance would not pay out for the broken vase and the original owner would have to claim on his own policy. The fact that the vase no longer existed would have no bearing on that, any more than it would if the thief had dropped it.
Jerry Pournelle, many years ago, related how someone in his neighbourhood hit a pole and dropped 16KV transmission lines onto the household power lines. Lighbulbs blew up, all appliances for blocks around were fried. (The point was that the surge protectors and UPS insulated his computers from the disaster).
the insurance company apparently replaced all these appliances. I presume the driver had very good insurance. I’m not sure that all insurance polcies would cover damage to vehicle contents, that’s a good question for an insurance expert. I know my house insurance specifically exculdes extreme valuables (art, currency, jewelry, antiques, etc.) not separately enumerated and separately covered, but that’s a whole different story.
The eggshell principle is also, IIRC, called “you takes your victim as you find them”, meaning that if the guy has the skull like an eggshell, or is hemophiliac and will bleed out from a minor injury, etc. - you assume blame for the outcome of your actions.
“You takes 'em as you finds 'em.”
There was a case some years ago (in southern California, IIRC) that gained national attention. Drunk driver causes crash. Victim in the other car, a Jehovah’s Witness, badly injured.
JW victim, in hospital, refuses blood transfusion. Doctors say she could die if she doesn’t accept transfusion.
Drunk driver eventually goes to court (on criminal charges of DUI negligence or mayhem or whatever they charge in cases like that – a criminal trial, not a civil lawsuit, IIRC). But sometime during all this, the victim died in the hospital.
Doctors still maintained that victim would have lived if she had accepted blood. Criminal charges upgraded to DUI vehicular manslaughter. (Well, womanslaughter I guess.)
Is the drunk driver liable for manslaughter in this case? Defense argued that the doctors could have saved her had she accepted blood. Her refusal, on religious grounds, was her own choice. After all, do we not all agree that people freely choose their religious beliefs in this country? Should defendant be guilty because of victim’s religious choices? Defendant is guilty of gross bodily injury (or mayhem or whatever they called it) at worst.
Drunk driver was found guilty of manslaughter.
ETA: L. A. Times article about it. Mentions other similar cases too.
A) Liable to Roe for $1M+Yugo damage
B) Liable to Roe for Yugo damage, Liable to Vase owner for $1M
In practice, Doe’s insurance would pay policy limits to the court and be done with it.
I think that this would universally be true in all 50 United States. Does anyone disagree?
I’m curious as to why this was an issue on the other board. Was the assumption made that Doe was 100% liable? If so, I don’t understand why there would be any issue as to his liability for the destruction of the vase.
I can understand that there might be an issue as to insurance coverage of the contents of the vehicle but not as to the liability of the negligent party.
This was on Reddit, phrased a little bit differently. People were stating that Doe couldn’t be held liable for what wasn’t normally found in the trunk of a car, and I didn’t think that was right. Maybe I should have said “95 Ford Festiva”, point being it’s a POS car worth almost nothing.
I agree. If instead of a vase, Doe had rammed the car and pushed it into a priceless statute, what then? No liability for the statute? Wasn’t that foreseeable?
I can only see 2 possible arguments against liability. One is that that no one could foresee such a valuable item would be in a car, but I don’t see how that would be relevant even if you could make an argument like that stick. Where would you ever draw the line?
The other that might work is that Roe didn’t take reasonable precautions in securing and protecting the vase. Clearly if it was destroyed in a simple collision, then it couldn’t have been packaged very well and certainly Roe should have anticipated that the car could have been in a collision or other mishap of some sort.
Wouldn’t this simply make Doe and Roe concurrently (and therefore joint and severally) liable for the damage to the vase? Two negligent acts that contribute to the destruction of the vase make both parties liable to the original owner.
Possibly, but my guess is that it would be a judgment call. Were the vase just rolling around the back seat, I can’t see Doe having any liability at all. On the other hand if it happened to be in a steel box with 12" of foam padding and it was still crushed by the impact, that would be a very different story. But I’m just guessing. For all I know this might turn out to be some sort of strict liability situation. I doubt it, but this was never my area of specialty.
I disagree. By looking at the proximate cause of the vase damage, the two ton piece of steel hitting the car would certainly be the overwhelming one.
Imagine if it was a 4 year old child in the back seat who was unbuckled. The car is hit by a drunk driver travelling 110mph, crippling the child for life with millions of dollars in future medical bills. Zero liability for the drunk driver? One hundred percent the fault of the parent for failure to buckle the child’s seatbelt?
My guess is that a court will apply different standards to children and vases, but that’s just a guess.
I’m going to assume that there was sarcasm missed in this exchange instead of a logical flaw. Of course there are differences between children and vases, but the same question remains. Is an “at-fault” driver responsible for everything he damages or is the contributory negligence of the other driver for failing to secure persons or items in his car a factor?
I would argue that there is no duty to an at-fault driver to protect oneself from harm against the at-fault driver’s negligence. Some jurisdictions do charge drivers who are not at fault because of their own negligence (failure to wear a seat belt being one).
However, I was addressing your argument that because Roe failed to properly secure the vase, that Doe had absolutely ZERO liability for that reason. I don’t think any jurisdiction would agree with that as whatever minimal fault Roe had in packaging the vase, the overwhelming fault was the car smashing into him and destroying the vase. Maybe 95-5 comparative fault?
I honestly don’t know and pretty much said that when I said it was a guess, right? But part of being a lawyer is being able to apply general principles of law. It doesn’t guarantee that you’ll be right, just that you’ll be able to make an educated guess.
So consider this fact pattern. You’re following me in traffic, I stop short and you have to stop short in return. The Ming vase rolling around in your back seat goes crashing to the floor. Am I liable? Does it matter why I stopped short? Does it matter if you were the proper distance away? I’d argue no to both of those since you should have properly secured the vase.