Do Not Mow Your Neighbor's Lawn.
The California Supreme Court has ruled that a landowner may be liable for injuries suffered on adjacent property over which he exercises “control.” Evidence that a landowner mowed the grass on adjacent property before the injury, and then erected a fence to enclose the property after the injury was sufficient to defeat a summary judgment motion.
Gilardo Alcaraz suffered an injury when he stepped on a broken water meter box in a narrow strip of land in front of his apartment building. The strip belonged to the City of Redwood City, not to Alacaraz's landlord, John Vece. The trial court granted summary judgment against Alcaraz on the ground that Vece did not own the property. The Supreme Court decided that there was a factual issue as to whether Vece had exercised sufficient “control” over the narrow strip to give rise to a duty to warn or to protect.
As a general rule, a person must maintain land in his or her possession in a reasonably safe condition, even if an instrumentality beyond the landowner's control causes a dangerous condition on the land. In this case, the broken meter box posed a danger to those on Vece's property who might enter the adjacent strip. Therefore, Vece had a duty to warn people on his property about the danger, or to protect them from it. Vece could have satisfied the duty by erecting a barricade, or by posting warnings on his own property. He did not have a duty to repair the broken meter box.
A person's duty to maintain property in a reasonably safe condition extends to land over which he or she exercises control. Title is not required. Here, the evidence of mowing the grass and erecting the fence created a triable issue about Vece's control of the property. Evidence of post-accident events was not inadmissible as subsequent remedial conduct, because it was not offered to prove negligence, but to prove control of the property. Cal. Evid. Code § 1151.
In her dissent, Justice Kennard stated that the law should only impose a duty on those (1) who have the legal right to control the property in question, or (2) who create or aggravate the hazard. Justice Brown opined that liability should be limited to those who derive a benefit from the property where the hazard exists. Justice Baxter found the proffered evidence insufficient to raise a triable issue about control of the strip.
Calvin House
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