In Torres v. 1420 Realty LLC, the Appellate Division, First Department recently applied the doctrine of “superseding cause” to affirm the dismissal of plaintiff’s personal injury case.
Under that doctrine, a defendant is relieved of liability where, after his negligence, an unforeseeable superseding event breaks the causal connection between his negligence and a plaintiff’s injuries.
This, according to the Torres court, is what happened here:
Plaintiff sustained injuries when she fell after the paint bucket she was using as a step stool tilted over, allegedly due to the uneven condition of the floor of her apartment in defendants’ building. Plaintiff’s independent and superseding act of using the paint bucket as a step stool, which was placed on an uneven floor, was not foreseeable, thereby breaking the chain of causation.
One takeaway from the court’s (terse) opinion is that – despite what the tort “reform” folks appear to believe (as is evident from, for example, the “Stella Awards”, which in turn derives from a gross misunderstanding of the so-called “McDonald’s hot coffee case”) – the law does provide a rational system for weeding out un-meritorious cases. The mechanisms of this system include the doctrines of superseding cause, assumption of risk, and comparative negligence.
The practical takeaway is not to use a bucket as a step-stool on an uneven floor.