Howard v. Wal-Mart Stores, Inc.

• Decision Date: 03 November 1998
• Docket Number: No. 98-1781,WAL-MART,98-1781
• Citation: 160 F.3d 358
• Parties: Dolores HOWARD, Plaintiff-Appellee, v.STORES, INC., Defendant-Appellant.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Seventh Circuit

Page 358

160 F.3d 358

Dolores HOWARD, Plaintiff-Appellee, v. WAL-MART STORES, INC., Defendant-Appellant.

No. 98-1781.

United States Court of Appeals Seventh Circuit.

Argued Oct. 8, 1998.

Decided Nov. 3, 1998.

Joan M. Lockwood (argued), Gray & Ritter, St. Louis, MO, for Plaintiff-Appellee.

James E. DeFranco (argued), Neville, Richards, DeFranco & Wuller, Belleville, IL, for Defendant-Appellant.

Before POSNER, Chief Judge, and CUMMINGS and ESCHBACH, Circuit Judges.

POSNER, Chief Judge.

We have before us a charming miniature of a case. In 1993 Dolores Howard, age 65, slipped and fell in a puddle of liquid soap that someone--no one knows who--had spilled on the floor of the aisle in a Wal-Mart store in Cahokia, Illinois. She was injured, and brought suit against Wal-Mart in an Illinois state court; the defendant removed the case to federal district court. At the time the suit was brought and removed, there was enough possibility that Howard's injury was severe (the injured leg had become infected) to lift the case just over the then $50,000 threshold for a diversity suit. But later she recovered and at trial asked for only $25,000 in damages. The jury awarded her $18,750. Wal-Mart has appealed out of fear (its lawyer explained to us at argument) of the precedential effect in future slip-and-fall cases of the judge's refusal to grant judgment for Wal-Mart as a matter of law. We don't tell people whether to exercise their rights of appeal, but we feel impelled to remind Wal-Mart and its lawyer that a district court's decision does not have precedential authority, e.g., Old Republic Ins. Co. v. Chuhak & Tecson, P.C., 84 F.3d 998, 1003-04 (7th Cir.1996); Anderson v. Romero, 72 F.3d 518, 525 (7th Cir.1995)--let alone a jury verdict or an unreported order by a magistrate judge (by any judicial officer, for that matter) refusing on unstated grounds to throw out a jury's verdict.

The issue on appeal is whether there was enough evidence of liability to allow the case to go to a jury, and, specifically, whether there was enough evidence that an employee rather than a customer spilled the soap. See Donoho v. O'Connell's, Inc., 13 Ill.2d 113, 148 N.E.2d 434 (1958); Wind v. Hy-Vee Food Stores, Inc., 272 Ill.App.3d 149, 208 Ill.Dec. 801, 650 N.E.2d 258, 262 (1995). Even if a customer spilled it, Wal-Mart could be liable if it failed to notice the spill and clean it up within a reasonable time. Donoho v. O'Connell's, Inc., supra, 148 N.E.2d at 437-38; Swartz v. Sears, Roebuck & Co., 264 Ill.App.3d 254, 201 Ill.Dec. 210, 636 N.E.2d 642, 654 (1993). It has a legal duty to make its premises reasonably safe for its customers. But there is no evidence with regard to how much time elapsed between the spill and the fall; it may have been minutes. Wal-Mart is not required to patrol the aisles continuously, but only at reasonable intervals. See Culli v. Marathon Petroleum Co., 862 F.2d 119 (7th Cir.1988) (collecting Illinois cases). So Howard could prevail only if there was enough evidence that an employee spilled the soap to satisfy the requirement of proving causation by a preponderance of the evidence.

The accident occurred in the morning, and morning is also when the employees stock the shelves. The defendant presented evidence that the puddle of liquid soap on which Howard slipped was about the diameter of a softball and was in the middle of the aisle. Howard testified that it was a large puddle on the right side of the aisle and "when I got up, I had it all over me, my coat, my pants, my shoes, my socks." An employee could have dropped one of the plastic containers of liquid soap on the floor while trying to shelve it and the container could have broken and leaked. Or the cap on one of the containers might have come loose. Or the containers might have been packed improperly in the box from which they were loaded onto the shelves and one of them might have sprung a leak. Alternatively, as Wal-Mart points out, a customer, or a customer's child, might have knocked a container off the shelf. A curious feature of the case, however, is that the container that leaked and caused the spill was never found. Howard argues, not implausibly, that a customer who had come across a damaged container or had damaged it would be unlikely to purchase it, having lost part of its contents--a large part, if Howard's testimony was believed; and the jury was entitled to believe it--or indeed to put it in her shopping cart and risk smearing her other purchases with liquid soap. In light of this consideration, we cannot say that the jury was irrational in finding that the balance of probabilities tipped in favor of the plaintiff, though surely only by a hair's breadth.

Is a hair's breadth enough, though? Judges, and commentators on the law of evidence, have been troubled by cases in which the plaintiff has established a probability that only minutely exceeds 50 percent that his version of what happened is correct. The concern is illuminated by the much-discussed bus...