Lange v. B & P Motor Express, Inc.

• Decision Date: 23 August 1966
• Docket Number: Civ. No. 3464.
• Citation: 257 F. Supp. 319
• Parties: Arthur A. LANGE, Lorraine Roberts, individually and as Personal Representative of Clyde M. Roberts, deceased, and the executrix of his estate, and Ohio Farmers Insurance Company, an insurance corporation, Plaintiffs, v. B & P MOTOR EXPRESS, INC., Roseland Cartage Co., Paul Van Mele and Joseph Van Mele, individually and as co-partners doing business as Roseland Cartage Co., and Donald H. Hoefle, Defendants.
• Court: U.S. District Court — Northern District of Indiana

257 F. Supp. 319

Arthur A. LANGE, Lorraine Roberts, individually and as Personal Representative of Clyde M. Roberts, deceased, and the executrix of his estate, and Ohio Farmers Insurance Company, an insurance corporation, Plaintiffs, v. B & P MOTOR EXPRESS, INC., Roseland Cartage Co., Paul Van Mele and Joseph Van Mele, individually and as co-partners doing business as Roseland Cartage Co., and Donald H. Hoefle, Defendants.

Civ. No. 3464.

United States District Court N. D. Indiana, South Bend Division.

August 23, 1966.

Benjamin Piser, South Bend, Ind., and Arlo McKinnon, of Kersten & McKinnon and Howard W. Bast, Milwaukee, Wis., for plaintiffs.

Arthur A. May, of Crumpacker, May, Levy & Searer, South Bend, Ind., for defendants.

ORDER

GRANT, Chief Judge.

This cause comes before the Court on plaintiffs' motion to amend their complaint to assert a new cause of action against the defendant-employer which alleges in substance the negligence in hiring an unsafe or negligent truckdriver. The importance of the question under Indiana law which was thereby raised prompted the filing of briefs by the parties. The Court, after thorough consideration, is of the opinion that the motion ought to be denied.

The original complaint on file seeks to recover for personal injuries sustained when defendants' tractor-trailer rear-ended plaintiff Lange's motor vehicle on the Indiana toll road. That complaint is in nine paragraphs. The first three allege diversity between the parties and the requisite jurisdictional amount.¹ The fourth paragraph alleges that at or about 5:15 A.M. of Thursday, October 11, 1962, on the westbound portion of the Indiana toll road in Porter County, Indiana, the defendants, through their agent Donald Hoefle, caused their 1960 Ford tractor-trailer to collide with the rear of a pickup truck being operated in a westerly direction by the deceased, Clyde Roberts. The fifth paragraph asserts a claim for relief under the theory of respondeat superior against the defendant-employers for the reason that, while in the scope of his employment, Hoefle operated the tractor-trailer (a) without maintaining a proper lookout; (b) without maintaining proper management and control; (c) at an excessive rate of speed under the circumstances and conditions then existing; (d) without exercising due care in overtaking and passing the pickup truck. The sixth paragraph claims that the foregoing acts of negligence were the proximate cause of the injuries sustained by plaintiffs Lange and Roberts. Paragraphs seven, eight and nine recite the extent of the injuries to plaintiffs and their vehicle.

Defendants in their answer to the original complaint admitted jurisdiction and the fact of the collision. What is more important, they admitted that Hoefle was operating within the scope of his employment at the time of the collision. All other material allegations were denied.

The amendment tendered by plaintiffs concerns only paragraph five of the complaint. It is in the form of an additional allegation of negligence on the part of the defendant-employers, and reads as follows:

"As plaintiffs are informed and believe, in addition to the negligence and failure to exercise due care stated above, the defendants B & P MOTOR EXPRESS, INC., ROSELAND CARTAGE CO., a corporation, PAUL VAN MELE and JOSEPH VAN MELE, individually and as co-partners doing business as ROSELAND CARTAGE CO., and each of them, were negligent and failed to exercise ordinary care in that, prior to and on October 11, 1962, said defendants employed the defendant DONALD H. HOEFLE to drive the tractor-trailer which on October 11, 1962 he negligently drove into the rear of the Chevrolet truck driven by CLYDE M. ROBERTS and occupied by the plaintiff ARTHUR A. LANGE as a passenger. As plaintiffs are informed and believe, the defendants employed and continued to employ the defendant DONALD H. HOEFLE to drive said tractor-trailer when they knew or in the exercise of due care should have known he had been a negligent and unsafe driver of a tractor-trailer in the past and as a result had theretofore driven a tractor-trailer into the rear of a passenger automobile on a public free-way, inflicting serious injuries upon the occupants and causing the death of one of them; that upon the basis of his driving record he was unsafe to be employed by the defendants as the driver of a tractor-trailer and their employing him in that capacity exposed the public using the highways, including said CLYDE M. ROBERTS and this affiant, ARTHUR A. LANGE, to an unreasonable risk of harm."

In substance, then, the amendment alleges negligence on behalf of the employer by reason of his hiring or retaining in employment "a negligent and unsafe driver" who, because of his incompetence, caused personal injury to the plaintiffs. The issue presented for determination is whether Indiana law permits pleading a separate count of negligence in hiring under the facts as alleged in the amendment.

I

It will be useful, prior to reviewing the Indiana authorities, to briefly summarize the general state of the law on the negligent-hiring theory. As might be expected, there is little consensus. The leading encyclopedic authorities are in sharp disagreement as to whether it constitutes a well-recognized rule of law.² A brief review of selected cases bears this out. One line of authorities supports its application, represented by Monty v. Orlandi, 169 Cal.App.2d 620, 337 P.2d 861 (1959); Kendall v. Gore Properties, Inc., 98 U.S.App.D.C 378, 236 F.2d 673 (1956); Bradley v. Stevens, 329 Mich. 556, 46 N.W.2d 382, 34 A.L.R.2d 367 (1951). Opposing this are those cases which limit the use of the theory to situations in which the plaintiff is a fellow servant of the wrongdoer, notably General Electric Co. v. Rees, 217 F.2d 595 (9th Cir. 1954); Central Truck-away System v. Moore, 304 Ky. 533, 201 S.W.2d 725 (1947); Minot v. Snavely, 172 F. 212 (8th Cir. 1909).³

The reasons which support the latter view are clearly more sound. It is argued that, since the true basis for liability of the employer is the imputation of the employee's wrongful act to him, the care or lack of it exercised by the employer in selecting his employee is irrelevant to the issues. All employer-liability cases, including those espousing the negligent-hiring theory, recognize that the employee must be found to have been guilty of some wrongful act or omission which caused the plaintiff's injuries. If so, then an ordinary respondeat superior case exists, and the employer would be liable even though he could show that he used all due care in hiring the employee.

Furthermore, a plaintiff under the negligent-hiring count would be entitled to introduce evidence of prior acts of negligence of the employee to show that the employer knew or should have known of his dangerous propensities. Thus the long-standing rule of evidence⁴ which would exclude evidence of earlier, specific acts of negligence of the defendant would be jeopardized.

Finally, a close examination of the cases which approve of the rule reveal that special situations may have dictated the result which would entitle the rule to be carefully limited in its application. Repeatedly the same factual pattern emerges: an employer hires a man well-known for his violent temper to perform work which brings him into contact with the public whereupon, at the slightest provocation, the employee intentionally assaults a patron or customer. Representative of the rule are those cases involving janitors,⁵ delivery boys,⁶ parking lot attendants,⁷ and bank employees.⁸ They deal with one of the more controversial areas of agency law, the responsibility of the employer for the intentional torts of his employees.

Only recently has there been a major shift in attitude imposing a greater liability on the employer under ordinary principles of respondeat superior.⁹ The prevailing opinion not many years ago narrowly restricted the scope of a man's employment to include those things which his employer had directed him to do, and no others. Since it was presumed that an employer would never direct the doing of an intentional tort, either expressly or impliedly, then such acts were not considered a part of the employment.¹⁰ While it is true that the term "scope of employment" is interpreted more liberally today to include a number of intentional torts, the fact remains that historically employer liability in this area is uncertain, if not absent altogether.

The negligent-hiring theory when applied to this aspect of employer liability takes on independent significance. It operates regardless of the question of scope of employment, since it does not involve agency or derivative liability. There is no overlap with agency law, for more often than not the employer would escape liability under those principles. Its application is soundly supported by modern policy, as evidenced by the present trend to open up the scope of employment to include intentional acts. It is, in other words, not only workable, but desirable in such special situations.

The theory has been applied in other factual settings, but they exhibit a common trait: a probable absence of liability under ordinary agency principles. For example, in Womack v. Preach, 64 Ariz. 61, 165 P.2d 657 (1946) a 4½ year old child was directed by his father to go on an errand, whereupon the defendant negligently drove against him in a truck. The father brought suit, and the defendant countered with the theory that the father was contributorily negligent by reason of his directing the child to go into a dangerous place. The Court reasoned that the child at the time of the accident was acting as his father's agent, but that a 4½ year old child is not capable of being negligent. However, the Court did find that the father was guilty of negligence in the first instance by engaging his child to enter a place of danger, knowing him to be incapable of comprehending that danger.

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