Litigation

Will Cal Supremes Overturn That Stupid Telephone Booth Case?

By Bruce Nye

Take a seat right there, children, and Uncle CBL will tell you one of his long boring stories about the olden days.

Once upon a time, before we all carried our own telephones around with us and before we all became so important that we had to answer calls in the movie theater, in depositions and in church, there were structures called telephone booths.  These were big glass or plastic-enclosed boxes.  They contained big black clunky land-line telephones that often ate our quarters without allowing us to complete our calls.  And they sometimes contained big plastic telephone book covers (telephone books = directories we used to look up numbers before the Internets came along).  The telephone book covers were normally empty, or had a bunch of torn up useless yellow pages.

Anyway, in 1983, the California Supreme Court, presided over by Chief Justice Rose Bird, wrote a decision that said the telephone company could be held liable for placing a telephone booth in a parking lot, fifteen feet from the street, where a drunk driver ran off the road, crashed into it and severely injured somebody inside.  The case was Bigbee v. Pacific Telephone and Telegraph Company (1983) 34 Cal.3d 49, described by one of Uncle CBL's favorite Superior Court judges as "one of the stupidest decisions ever to come out of the Supreme Court."

Late last year, the Supremes granted a hearing in the case of Cabral v. Ralph's Grocery Company, S178799.  As described by the Court, the issues are these:

(1) Does a big-rig truck driver owe a duty of care to freeway motorists not to park for non-emergency reasons in an "Emergency Parking Only" area at the side of a freeway? (2) Was the driver's act of parking in the "Emergency Parking Only" area not a substantial factor, as a matter of law, in causing plaintiff's injuries in this case?

The Court of Appeal ruled (in a non-citeable decision) that the driver who parked his truck owed no legal duty to the decedent who ran into his truck, so that judgment for the plaintiff was reversed.

The case was argued and submitted last week, so we'll hear something in the next sixty days.  But that isn't the interesting part.  Here's the interesting part:

Last month, the Supremes issued a "grant and hold" -- meaning "we aren't really going to hear this case, but we're going to hear another one kind of like it and the decision in the first case may dispose of this one" -- in Gonzales v. Southern California Gas S188956.  This was an unpublished decision, which in California means it can't be cited, has no precedential value, means nothing to anybody but the immediate parties.  But it's a death case, where plaintiffs received a judgment of $800,000 after their daughter swerved to avoid a coming car, jumped a curb and crashed her car into defendant's gas meter assembly more than eleven feet from the curb.  The Court of Appeal took the judgment away and ordered the trial court to enter judgment for Southern California Gas.

Facts sound familiar?  The main difference between these and Bigbee, the phone booth case, seem to be that the victims here were in the moving object, not the stationary one.  Well, that isn't quite the only difference -- there had been one previous incident involving the Bigbee phone booth. 

In both the recent cases, the Court of Appeal held that the collisions were not foreseeable and there was no legal duty owed to the decedent.  These decisions both seem to be staring Bigbee right in the eye and saying "oh yeah?  Says who?"

We'll let you know what happens.

Full post as published by CalBizLit on February 15, 2011 (boomark / email).