May 19, 2011
Yesterday, the Indiana Supreme Court decided, for the first time, the extent to which someone participating in a sport is liable to others who are injured as a result of that participation in
Pfenning v. Lineman, ___ N.E.2d ___ (Ind. 2011), Cause No. 27S02-1006-CV-33. In that decision, the Court announced a "limited new rule" that applies only to cases involving sports injuries.
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The plainiff in this case is a 16-year old girl who was attending a golf event. While driving a golf cart on a cart path, she was struck in the mouth by a golf ball and injured. She filed an action against her grandfather (who brought her to the event), the golfer who hit the ball that struck her, the bar that promoted the event, and the operator of the golf course. Each of the defendants moved for summary judgment, the trial court granted those motions, and the Court of Appeals affirmed.
On appeal, the Court first addressed the liability of the golfer. The Court recognized that it has not yet addressed the issue of duty and sports injuries and surveyed the decisions of both the Indiana Court of Appeals and other jurisdictions on the topic. The Court found that many of these decisions could not apply to Indiana because of the Comparative Fault Act.
In resolving the issue for Indiana, a foremost consideration must be the Indiana General Assembly's enactment of a comparative fault system and its explicit direction that "fault" includes assumption of risk and incurred risk. These concepts focus on a plaintiff's venturousness and require a subjective determination. As noted above, decisions of this Court have established that such considerations of a plaintiff's incurred risk, even if evaluated by an objective standard, cannot be used to support a finding of no duty in a negligence action. In contrast, the sports injury decisions of the Court of Appeals have employed consideration of the "inherent risks" of a sport to justify development of a no-duty rule. We view the evaluation of such inherent risks to be tantamount to an objective consideration of the risk of harm that a plaintiff undertakes and thus unsatisfactory because it violates the Comparative Fault Act and the precedent of this Court.
Because of this, the Court refused to conclude that the golfer owed no duty to the plaintiff. Instead, the Court focused on the question of whether the golfer breached that duty.
Breach of duty usually involves an evaluation of reasonableness and thus is usually a question to be determined by the finder of fact in negligence cases. But in cases involving sports injuries, and in such cases only, we conclude that a limited new rule should apply acknowledging that reasonableness may be found by the court as a matter of law. As noted above, the sports participant engages in physical activity that is often inexact and imprecise and done in close proximity to others, thus creating an enhanced possibility of injury to others. The general nature of the conduct reasonable and appropriate for a participant in a particular sporting activity is usually commonly understood and subject to ascertainment as a matter of law.
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We hold that, in negligence claims against a participant in a sports activity, if the conduct of such participant is within the range of ordinary behavior of participants in the sport, the conduct is reasonable as a matter of law and does not constitute a breach of duty.
The only exception the Court recognized to this rule is if the sports participant acted intentionally or recklessly.
The Court did not extend this rationale to protect the owner of the golf course. Instead, it addressed the issue as a matter of premises liability law. It found the plaintiff was an invitee and that the owner of the golf course had an objectively reasonable expectation that persons present on its golf course would realize the risk of being struck by an errant golf ball and take appropriate precautions.
The Court's rejection of the defendants' "no duty" argument exposed the sponsor of the event to liability because the Court concluded that there was a genuine issue of fact regarding the existence of a duty by the sponsor. Likewise, summary judgment should not have been granted to the plaintiff's grandfather, who brought her to the event.
This is clearly an important decision. First, it clearly sets forth the Court's point of view regarding the interaction of assumption of the risk and the Comparative Fault Act; assumption of the risk arguments are irrelevant to the issue of whether a duty exists. This will have a broader application than the area of sports injuries addressed within this opinion.
Second, the Court's formulation of a new rule regarding how questions of breach are resolved in sports injury cases is intriguing. While the rule applies to a limited set of cases and the Court indicated that it will only apply to that subset, negligence defendants may be well served by discovering other limited subsets of cases to which this rule should apply.
Lessons:
- A court cannot premise the lack of a duty on the concepts of inherent risk or assumption of the risk.
- In cases involving sports injuries, the reasonableness of the conduct of a participant in a sports activity may be found by the court as a matter of law.
- In negligence claims against a participant in a sports activity, if the conduct of such participant is within the range of ordinary behavior of participants in the sport, the conduct is reasonable as a matter of law and does not constitute a breach of duty, unless the sports participant acts recklessly or intentionally causes an injury.
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