Albers by Albers v. Church of the Nazarene, 82-1647

• Decision Date: 17 January 1983
• Docket Number: No. 82-1647,82-1647
• Citation: 698 F.2d 852
• Parties: 12 Fed. R. Evid. Serv. 437 Sarah ALBERS, a minor, by her father and next friend, Vinton L. ALBERS, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. CHURCH OF THE NAZARENE and the Lombard Church of the Nazarene Day Care Center, Defendants-Appellees.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Seventh Circuit

Page 852

698 F.2d 852

12 Fed. R. Evid. Serv. 437

Sarah ALBERS, a minor, by her father and next friend, Vinton L. ALBERS, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. CHURCH OF THE NAZARENE and the Lombard Church of the Nazarene Day Care Center, Defendants-Appellees.

No. 82-1647.

United States Court of Appeals Seventh Circuit.

Argued Dec. 7, 1982.

Decided Jan. 17, 1983.

John A. O'Malley, O'Malley & O'Malley, Ltd., Chicago, Ill., for plaintiff-appellant.

Barry L. Kroll, C. Barry Montgomery & David E. Morgans, Chicago, Ill., for defendants-appellees.

Before BAUER and POSNER, Circuit Judges, and HOFFMAN, Senior District Judge. ^*

POSNER, Circuit Judge.

This is an appeal by the plaintiff in a personal-injury case from a judgment entered on a jury verdict for the defendants. Federal jurisdiction is based on diversity of citizenship. The applicable substantive law is that of Illinois.

In 1976 the plaintiff, Sarah Albers, age 5--a professional model despite her youth--was attending the Lombard Church of the Nazarene Day Care Center. There was a tree with low branches in the center's playground. Testifying years later at the trial, Sarah, the only witness to the accident, described what happened: "I had a pail, and I put sand in it, and I put it on the tree branch. And the tree branch came down." The branch went into one of her eyes, causing blindness in that eye and some disfigurement. The offending branch and the other low branches were later pruned.

The district judge refused to give several instructions requested by the plaintiff. One relates to landowners' liability for an accident to a child. The district judge held that the liability standard is ordinary negligence. The plaintiff argues that under Illinois law a landowner (or land occupier), whether or not guilty of ordinary negligence, is liable for an injury to a child caused by a condition on the land if the defendant knew or should have known that there was a reasonably foreseeable risk of injury to young children, should have foreseen that young children would go on the land, and could have eliminated the hazard at a slight cost relative to the danger to the children; and that she was entitled to an instruction setting forth this alternative basis of liability.

The language of the proposed instruction is drawn almost verbatim from Kahn v. James Burton Co., 5 Ill.2d 614, 625, 126 N.E.2d 836, 842 (1955). The plaintiff in that case, an 11-year-old boy, had been injured while playing on a lumber pile. One of the main issues in the trial and intermediate appellate courts was whether the lumber pile was an attractive nuisance, but the Illinois Supreme Court decided that the requirement of "attraction" had given rise to inconsistent results and therefore "the only proper basis for decision in such cases dealing with personal injuries to children are the customary rules of ordinary negligence cases." 5 Ill.2d at 624, 126 N.E.2d at 841. If the opinion had stopped at this point, there would be no basis for the instruction requested in this case, but the court went on to explain that while generally "an owner or one in possession and control of premises is under no duty to keep them in any particular state or condition to promote the safety of trespassers or others who come upon them without any invitation, express or implied ...[,] an exception exists where the owner or person in possession knows, or should know, that young children habitually frequent the vicinity of a defective structure or dangerous agency existing on the land, which is likely to cause injury to them because they, by reason of their immaturity, are incapable of appreciating the risk involved, and where the expense or inconvenience of remedying the condition is slight compared to the risk to the children. In such cases there is a duty ... to exercise due care to remedy the condition or otherwise protect the children from injury resulting from it. The element of attraction is significant only insofar as it indicates that the trespass should be anticipated, the true basis of liability being the foreseeability of harm to the child." 5 Ill.2d at 625, 116 N.E.2d at 841-42 (citation omitted).

The two passages we have quoted, one invoking "the customary rules of ordinary negligence cases," the other setting forth a more detailed standard of care applicable to injuries to children as a result of dangerous land conditions, have led some plaintiffs in Illinois to attempt in cases such as this to present alternative theories of liability to the jury. The plaintiff in Corcoran v. Village of Libertyville, 73 Ill.2d 316, 323, 22 Ill.Dec. 701, 702, 383 N.E.2d 177, 178 (1978), the case most heavily relied on by the plaintiff in this case, was allowed to do just that, but the cases are different in a crucial respect. In Corcoran, a two-year-old child fell into a ditch in the defendant's park. The child's status on the land was unclear. He may have been a licensee (whom tort law usually treats as the equivalent of a trespasser), or he may have been an invitee. See 73 Ill.2d at 329, 22 Ill.Dec. at 704-05, 383 N.E.2d at 180-81. If the former, he was entitled to no higher level of care than the Kahn decision had required. But if he was an invitee he was entitled to a higher standard of care. "In ordinary negligence, the common law status of Matthew Corcoran on the premises where he was injured becomes relevant in establishing the duty owed him. The highest duty imposed by law upon an owner or occupier of land to a person on his premises is that owed to an invitee. In reviewing the counts pleaded by plaintiffs in ordinary negligence, we will assume that Matthew Corcoran was an invitee to whom defendants owed a duty to maintain the premises in a reasonably safe condition and to warn of dangerous, nonobvious conditions." 73 Ill.2d at 329, 22 Ill.Dec. at 705, 383 N.E.2d at 181 (emphasis added).

A glance back at the longer passage quoted from Kahn will confirm that the standard adopted there is intended to protect children who are trespassers or licensees rather than invitees. The landowner is liable only if he knew or had reason to know that "young children habitually frequent the vicinity" of a dangerous condition on his land. This requirement would be superfluous in cases involving children who are invitees, as children in schools or day care centers are.

The jury in this case found that the defendants had not breached the high standard of care ("the highest duty") they owed the plaintiff as an invitee. Having so found, the jury could not consistently have found that the defendants had breached the lower standard of care that they would have owed Sarah if she had simply wandered into the playground from the street. Cummings v. Jackson, 57 Ill.App.3d 68, 71-72, 14 Ill.Dec. 848, 850-51, 372 N.E.2d 1127, 1129-30 (1978), holds that if the child plaintiff's status as an invitee is conceded, the liability standard is ordinary negligence and dismissal of a separate count based on the Kahn standard is therefore not prejudicial.

The only discordant note is the statement in Corcoran, repeated in Bazos v. Chouinard, 96 Ill.App.3d 526, 531, 51 Ill.Dec. 931, 935, 421 N.E.2d 566, 570 (1981), that "it would indeed be incongruous to conclude that a condition which did not pose any foreseeable risk to children did pose such a risk to invitees." 73 Ill.2d at 329, 22 Ill.Dec. at 705, 383 N.E.2d at 181. This makes it sound as if the duty of care to an invitee is set on the assumption that the invitee is always an adult, in which event Kahn could require a higher standard of care to a child, even though the child was an invitee, than the standard of ordinary negligence would require. But this view attributes to the Illinois Supreme Court a more radical intention than we find in the opinion: not just to modify the attractive-nuisance doctrine but to establish a separate standard of care for all cases involving accidents to children caused by hazardous conditions on land. This interpretation would also be contrary to other language of Corcoran that we have quoted, to language in other Illinois cases such as Rahn v. Beurskens, 66 Ill.App.2d 423, 428, 213 N.E.2d 301, 304 (1966) (Kahn "adopts the rule that the true basis of liability to a child is the foreseeability of harm to the child and customary rules of negligence apply"), to the holding in Cummings, and to basic principles of negligence law, which do not make the defendant's duty of care invariant to the type of victim he is likely to encounter. See, with particular reference to children, Prosser, Handbook of the Law of Torts 172-73 (4th ed. 1971). The level of care required of a day care center is not determined by assuming that it really has an adult clientele, and this case was not tried on any such assumption.

The plaintiff wanted to present still another theory of liability to the jury. Regulations of the State of Illinois require that day care centers be safely equipped and maintained with due regard for the age of the children, and the plaintiff asked the judge to instruct the jury that "conduct in violation of the law is presumed negligence." Since the regulations are general in terms, and so...