Miller v. Hooper

• Decision Date: 25 January 1921
• Citation: 112 A. 256
• Parties: MILLER v. HOOPER et al.
• Court: Maine Supreme Court

112 A. 256

MILLER

v. HOOPER et al.

Supreme Judicial Court of Maine.

Jan. 25, 1921.

Report from Superior Court, Cumberland County, at Law.

Action by Alice Miller against Mabel L. Hooper and others. On report from the superior court. Judgment for defendants.

Argued before CORNISH, C. J., and SPEAR, HANSON, DUNN, MORRILL, WILSON, and DEASY, JJ.

Jacob H. Berman, of Portland, and Benja min L. Berman, of Lewiston, for plaintiff.

Maurice E. Rosen and William A. Connellan, both of Portland, for defendants.

DEASY, J. The plaintiff was one of the household of her father who occupied as tenant of the defendants the lower of two tenements in a house situated on Franklin Street, Portland.

On December 11, 1919, while leaving the house by the back stairway, used in common by the occupants of both tenements, she tripped and fell, sustaining injuries to recover damages for which this suit is brought.

The duties which a landlord owes to his tenants and their households are established by many judicial decisions. He must make such repairs as he expressly agrees to make. He must disclose to the tenant any hidden defects of which he knows or should know. No further duty devolves upon him in respect to the premises of which the tenants are given exclusive possession. But, besides these, he has a further duty in respect to halls, stairways, and approaches which remain in his control subject to use by the tenant or ordinarily by several tenants.

He must exercise reasonable care to keep these in safe repair.

Counsel for the defendant urges that the condition of the stairway at the time of the plaintiff's accident was substantially the same as when her father took his lease and moved to the premises, and he argues that the owner performs his full legal duty if he keep stairways, dedicated to the common use of tenants, in the same state of repair or disrepair that they were in at the beginning of the tenancy.

This position finds support in a series of Massachusetts cases, one of the earliest being Moynihan v. Allyn, 162 Mass. 272, 38 N. E. 497, and among the latest Angevine v. Hewitson, 235 Mass. 126, 126 N. E. 425, and Kirby v. Tirrell, 236 Mass. 170, 128 N. E. 28.

As applied to the plan of construction, this position is sound.

An owner may build a tenement house with stairways which because of steepness or for other obvious structural reasons are inconvenient or even unsafe. The tenant cannot exact any change. If such stairways need to be repaired or rebuilt, the owner is not required to make them safer or more convenient.

But the application of this doctrine to repairs made necessary by wear, breaking, or decay is opposed to the great weight of authority. We conceive the true rule to be that the owner must exercise due care to keep in reasonably safe repair stairways and passageways which remain under his own control.

Among the many cases supporting this rule are the following: Horn v. Danziger, 110 Misc. Rep. 341, 180 N. Y. Supp. 97; Burke v. Hulett, 216 Ill. 545, 75 N. E. 240; Lang v. Hill, 157 Mo. App. 685, 138 S. W. 698; Starr v. Sperry, 185 Iowa, 540, 167 N. W. 533; Widing v. Ins. Co., 95 Minn. 279, 104 N. W. 239, 111 Am. St. Rep. 471; La Plante v. La Zear, 31 Ind. App. 433, 68 N. E. 312; Butler v. Watson, 193 Mich. 322, 159 N. W. 507; Dodson v. Herndon, 147 Ky. 181, 143 S. W. 1011; Johnson v. Brewing Co., 75 N. J. Law, 282, 68 Atl. 85; Koskoff v. Goldman, 86 Conn. 415, 85 Atl. 592.

The Maine case...