St. Paul Fire & Marine Ins. Co. v. Piedmont Natural Gas Co.
| Decision Date | 17 June 1968 |
| Docket Number | No. 11385.,11385. |
| Citation | 397 F.2d 263 |
| Parties | ST. PAUL FIRE AND MARINE INSURANCE COMPANY, Appellant, v. PIEDMONT NATURAL GAS COMPANY, Inc., Appellee. |
| Court | U.S. Court of Appeals — Fourth Circuit |
Welch Jordan, Greensboro, N. C. (William B. Rector, Jr., and Jordan, Wright, Henson & Nichols, Greensboro, N. C., on brief), for appellant.
L. P. McLendon, Jr., and Jerry W. Amos, Greensboro, N. C. (McLendon, Brim, Brooks, Pierce & Daniels, Greensboro, N. C., on brief), for appellee.
Before SOBELOFF, BOREMAN and BRYAN, Circuit Judges.
In July 1962 The Shopper's World, a clothing store in Burlington, North Carolina, was completely destroyed by an explosion and a resulting fire. Several months later, St. Paul Fire & Marine Insurance Company, plaintiff in the court below, paid to the store's owner, according to an insurance contract, the sum of approximately $130,000.00 as reimbursement for losses of store furnishings, equipment and inventory. Pursuing its contractual right of subrogation, St. Paul brought this diversity action against Piedmont Natural Gas Company, Inc., alleging that the explosion and consequent destruction of the store's contents were proximately caused by the gas company's negligence.
At trial no one seriously questioned the fact that the disaster was attributable to natural gas, but the evidence was conflicting and each party presented voluminous testimony from numerous witnesses to bolster its theory of the cause of the explosion. Following a long trial the case was submitted to the jury which rendered a verdict in favor of the gas company.
The only questions presented on this appeal involve alleged errors in the court's charge to the jury. The parts of the charge to which objection is made by the plaintiff are those in which the court undertook to explain to the jury certain basic principles and propositions pertaining to proximate cause, concurrent causation, and superseding negligence. After a thorough review and consideration of the allegations of error, the relevant North Carolina law and the charge as a whole, we have concluded that the charge was not so incomplete or so fatally misleading as to command reversal. Since no novel questions are here raised and inasmuch as we affirm the judgment below, we conclude that no useful purpose would be served here by an extended expositive statement of the evidence, the admitted facts and the contentions of the parties which would necessarily...
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Glover v. BIC Corp.
...is not sufficient to constitute a sufficient objection to the instructions that were given"); St. Paul Fire and Marine Ins. Co. v. Piedmont Natural Gas Co., 397 F.2d 263, 264 (4th Cir.1968) ("This procedure is not even remotely in accord with Rule 51, Fed.R.Civ.P., and really amounts to a g......
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Glover v. BIC Corp.
...is not sufficient to constitute a sufficient objection to the instructions that were given"); St. Paul Fire and Marine Ins. Co. v. Piedmont Natural Gas Co., 397 F.2d 263, 264 (4th Cir.1968) ("This procedure is not even remotely in accord with Rule 51, Fed.R.Civ.P., and really amounts to a g......
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...without any specific objections to the jury charge does not constitute compliance with Rule 51. St. Paul Fire & Marine Ins. Co. v. Piedmont Natural Gas Co., 397 F.2d 263, 264 (4th Cir.1968). Serio-US did not object to the jury instructions as required by Rule 51(c). As a result, it may only......
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