Write a two to three (2-3) page paper in which you:
1. Explain the innkeeper’s duty in this case.
2. Summarize the trial court’s decision of innkeeper negligence or not. Explain how the court arrived at that conclusion.
3. Speculate whether or not the innkeeper likely would be held liable for breach of duty under the following changed circumstances.
3. Guest McCarty had locked the sliding glass door before she left her room for dinner and meeting. Intruder had pried open lock to gain entrance, assaulted her, and fled.
3. Shortly after guest McCarty had returned to her room from dinner, she opened her door when she heard a knock, without looking through the peephole. She thought that it was her supervisor whom she promised to give a revised version of the speech, which she was to make the next day, for his review. Instead, it was a male colleague, whose advances she had rejected at dinner. The colleague pushed through the open door, assaulted her and fled.
. Format your assignment according to these formatting requirements:
4. Typed, double spaced, using Times New Roman font (size 12), with one-inch margins on all sides; references must follow APA or school-specific format. Check with your professor for any additional instructions.
4. Include a cover page containing the title of the assignment, the student’s name, the professor’s name, the course title, and the date. The cover page and the reference page are not included in the required page length.
The specific course learning outcomes associated with this assignment are:
· Identify the elements of negligence, that is, duty, breach, causation, proximate cause, and damages.
· Use technology and information resources to research issues related to law and the legal system.
· Write clearly and concisely about issues in law and the legal system using proper writing mechanics.
Pages 98-99 as follows:
MCCARTY v. PHEASANT RUN, INC.
826 F.2d 1554 (7th Cir. 1987)
POSNER, J.
…Dula McCarty, a guest at the Pheasant Run Lodge in St. Charles, Illinois, was assaulted by an intruder in her room, and brought suit against the owner of the resort. The suit charges negligence, and bases federal jurisdiction on diversity of citizenship. The parties agree that Illinois law governs the substantive issues. The jury brought in a verdict for the defendant, and Mrs. McCarty appeals.…
In 1981 Mrs. McCarty, then 58 years old and a merchandise manager for Sears Roebuck, checked into Pheasant Run—a large resort hotel on 160 acres outside Chicago—to attend a Sears business meeting. In one wall of her second-floor room was a sliding glass door equipped with a lock and a safety chain. The door opens onto a walkway that has stairs leading to a lighted courtyard to which there is public access. The drapes were drawn and the door covered by them. Mrs. McCarty left the room for dinner and a meeting. When she returned, she undressed and got ready for bed. As she was coming out of the bathroom, she was attacked by a man with a stocking mask. He beat and threatened to rape her. She fought him off, and he fled. He has never been caught. Although Mrs. McCarty’s physical injuries were not serious, she claims that the incident caused prolonged emotional distress which, among other things, led her to take early retirement from Sears.
Investigation of the incident by the police revealed that the sliding glass door had been closed but not locked, that it had been pried open from the outside, and that the security chain had been broken. The intruder must have entered Mrs. McCarty’s room by opening the door to the extent permitted by the chain, breaking the chain, and sliding the door open the rest of the way. Then he concealed himself somewhere in the room until she returned and entered the bathroom.
Mrs. McCarty argues that the judge should have granted her motion for judgment notwithstanding the jury’s verdict for the defendant.…
As [a] ground for denying the motion for judgment n.o.v., the district judge correctly pointed out that the case was not so one-sided in the plaintiff’s favor that the grant of a directed verdict or judgment n.o.v. in her favor would be proper. Her theories of negligence are that the defendant should have made sure the door was locked when she was first shown to her room; should have warned her to keep the sliding glass door locked; should have equipped the door with a better lock; should have had more security guards (only two were on duty, and the hotel has more than 500 rooms),…should have made the walkway on which the door opened inaccessible from ground level; should have adopted better procedures for preventing unauthorized persons from getting hold of keys to guests’ rooms; or should have done some combination of these things. The suggestion that the defendant should have had better procedures for keeping keys away from unauthorized persons is irrelevant, for it is extremely unlikely that the intruder entered the room through the front door.…The other theories were for the jury to accept or reject, and its rejection of them was not unreasonable.
There are various ways in which courts formulate the negligence standard. The analytically (not necessarily the operationally) most precise is that it involves determining whether the burden of precaution is less than the magnitude of the
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accident, if it occurs, multiplied by the probability of occurrence. (The product of this multiplication, or “discounting,” is what economists call an expected accident cost.) If the burden is less, the precaution should be taken. This is the famous “Hand Formula” announced in United States v. Carroll Towing Co., 159 F.2d 169, 173 (2d Cir. 1947) (L. Hand, J.), an admiralty case, and since applied in a variety of cases not limited to admiralty.…
We are not authorized to change the common law of Illinois, however, and Illinois courts do not cite the Hand Formula but instead define negligence as failure to use reasonable care, a term left undefined.…But as this is a distinction without a substantive difference, we have not hesitated to use the Hand Formula in cases governed by Illinois law.…The formula translates into economic terms the conventional legal test for negligence. This can be seen by considering the factors that the Illinois courts take into account in negligence cases: the same factors, and in the same relation, as in the Hand Formula.…Unreasonable conduct is merely the failure to take precautions that would generate greater benefits in avoiding accidents than the precautions would cost.
Ordinarily, and here, the parties do not give the jury the information required to quantify the variables that the Hand Formula picks out as relevant. That is why the formula has greater analytic than operational significance. Conceptual as well as practical difficulties in monetizing personal injuries may continue to frustrate efforts to measure expected accident costs with the precision that is possible, in principle at least, in measuring the other side of the equation—the cost or burden of precaution.…For many years to come juries may be forced to make rough judgments of reasonableness, intuiting rather than measuring the factors in the Hand Formula; and so long as their judgment is reasonable, the trial judge has no right to set it aside, let alone substitute his own judgment.
Having failed to make much effort to show that the mishap could have been prevented by precautions of reasonable cost and efficacy, Mrs. McCarty is in a weak position to complain about the jury verdict. No effort was made to inform the jury what it would have cost to equip every room in the Pheasant Run Lodge with a new lock, and whether the lock would have been jimmy-proof.…And since the door to Mrs. McCarty’s room was unlocked, what good would a better lock have done? No effort was made, either, to specify an optimal security force for a resort the size of Pheasant Run. No one considered the fire or other hazards that a second-floor walkway not accessible from ground level would create. A notice in every room telling guests to lock all doors would be cheap, but since most people know better than to leave the door to a hotel room unlocked when they leave the room—and the sliding glass door gave on a walkway, not a balcony—the jury might have thought that the incremental benefits from the notice would be slight.…
Affirmed.
NOTES TO MCCARTY v. PHEASANT RUN, INC.
1. The Learned Hand Formula for Negligence.
The “Hand formula” (described by Judge Learned Hand in Carroll Towing) was expressed algebraically, stating that conduct would be negligent if B < PL. In that expression, B stands for the burden of prevention or avoidance, and an actor is negligent if that burden is less than P, which stands for the probability of loss, multiplied by L, which stands for the magnitude of loss that would be avoided with the possible prevention or avoidance. From whose perspective is it
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“reasonable” for one person to spend a small amount of money to protect another person from suffering a significant physical injury or a large financial loss? Would that make sense to the first person, the other person, or to society as a whole?
2. Evidence of Reasonable Conduct.
Judge Posner discounts the value of posting notices in the hotel’s rooms by saying that people generally know that it is a good idea to lock doors. Would a notice have helped avoid the injury in this case if it had alerted the victim that there was a sliding glass door behind the room’s closed curtains? That possibility apparently was presented weakly or not at all at the trial. It is important to notice, however, that once the jury has reached its decision, it is very difficult for a judge to rule that the jury has so severely misapplied the reasonable person standard that a new trial or judgment as a matter of law must be granted to reject the jury’s verdict.
3. Costs and Benefits in Non-Economic Terms.
Some social values may be hard to quantify and therefore difficult to recognize in a cost-benefit analysis. Tort law, however, ordinarily recognizes a broad range of factors in defining reasonable care. For example, the definitions of costs and benefits contained in the Restatement (Second) of Torts definitions of reasonable care take societal values into account.
Section 291. Unreasonableness; How Determined; Magnitude of Risk and Utility of Conduct
Where an act is one which a reasonable man would recognize as involving a risk of harm to another, the risk is unreasonable and the act is negligent if the risk is of such magnitude as to outweigh what the law regards as the utility of the act or of the particular manner in which it is done.
Section 292. Factors Considered in Determining Utility of Actor’s Conduct
In determining what the law regards as the utility of the actor’s conduct for the purpose of determining whether the actor is negligent, the following factors are important:
(a) the social value which the law attaches to the interest which is to be advanced or protected by the conduct;
(b) the extent of the chance that this interest will be advanced or protected by the particular course of conduct;
(c) the extent of the chance that such interest can be adequately advanced or protected by another and less dangerous course of conduct.
Section 293. Factors Considered in Determining Magnitude of Risk
In determining the magnitude of the risk for the purpose of determining whether the actor is negligent, the following factors are important:
(a) the social value which the law attaches to the interests which are imperiled;
(b) the extent of the chance that the actor’s conduct will cause an invasion of any interest of the other or of one of a class of which the other is a member;
(c) the extent of the harm likely to be caused to the interests imperiled;
(d) the number of persons whose interests are likely to be invaded if the risk takes effect in harm.
(Best 98-100)
Best, Arthur. Basic Tort Law: Cases Statutes & Problems, 4th Edition. Aspen Publishers, 10/2014. VitalBook file.
The citation provided is a guideline. Please check each citation for accuracy before use.
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