Smellytele
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Jay Peak Lawsuit
- Thread starter Huck_It_Baby
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mattchuck2
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This "Domeskier" guy is coming across as a real a-hole....
Abubob
Well-known member
Hey, what happened to the unsubscribe? Let me out!
I agree that a ski resort might decided to close its ski schools if a court were to find that it had some heightened duty of care to students. I think that would be a bad thing. Ski schools by and large perform the critical service of preparing novice skiers to use the facilities safely and responsibly. That being said, I think there may be special circumstances in which a ski school has failed to excercise due care in protecting students from unncessary risks. It might be the case that the standard is one of recklessness rather than negligence. I do not think JP's teaching novices on Interstate is reckless. I do not think it is reckless to teach a novice on a beginnger slope in a posted slow skiing zone. i think it would be reckless to lead a class of beginners through a terrain park. I think it would be reckless to hold beginner lessons on a slope simultaneously being use as a racecourse. I do not think the standard of care I am proposing would shift liability to resorts for the inherent dangers of skiing. Beginners fall and run into things. What they don't assume is the risk that the resort will teach them in unnecessarily unsafe circumstances, any more than a child at PS 131 assumes the risk that the ceiling will collapse or that Bobby will bring a gun to class. I leave it to the courts and the resorts to determine what are the appropriate circumstances for teaching novices. Unlike many of you, I think the fact that a novice was mowed down by an out-of-control boarder is evidence (necessarily defeasible) that the resort's duty to the child was breached. That is all I have been and all I will argue in this thread.
Whereas some so-called "Moderators" have been the model of reserve and temperance.
from_the_NEK
Active member
Well done.
Hardly. I would ask for evidence, but then I would have to explain to you the different ways to breach a standard of care, including negligence and recklessness, and I see you are primarily interested in scoring points with the peanut gallery. Not worth my time.
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fbrissette
Well-known member
Should I conclude from this that ski instructors cannot by definition take kids into a glade because it automatically imposes unnecessary risks on skiers ?
No, not by definition. Although it would certainly be reckless (and not merely negligent) for a resort to take a novice skier into the woods on their first day on skis. Hitting a tree is one of the inherent risks of the sport and when a skier has sufficient skills to take to the woods, a resort should not be liable for trying to teach them to do it safely. This is not to say that an instructor should be taking relatively inexperienced skiers into tight and steep trees. There could be cases where the decision by an instructor to lead a student into the trees would breach the standard of care applicable to the instructor/skier relationship.
Here's a hypothetical for you: If you fell in a crevasse while skiing Chamonix, would you think it irrelevant to the resort's liability to you that you hired one of its guides to lead you down the mountain?
fbrissette
Well-known member
I have skied in Chamonix (more than once) and I've also done a lot of backcountry skiing in glaciated and avalanche prone terrain. When I hire a guide, I know very well what I'm getting into, what the risks (and rewards) are. Were I to fall into a crevasse, I would be extremely unlikely to sue.
When I put my son in ski school I knew very well that he would be taught by a teenager and that he would taking lifts with less supervision, but at some point, you have to live your life.
Another interesting case, this time with facts much closer to the ones under consideration here. It's a California case from 1960, and I have no idea if it remains good law or how it was resolved on remand. I think the jury instruction reproduced below sums up fairly nicely legal principle I have been articulating. For those of you how think that the only legally relevant question with respect to JP's liability is whether the out of control customer was employed by the ski area at the time of the incident, I submit this link for your edification. Make what you will of it.
http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=2425812637398516936&q=%22ski+school%22&hl=en&as_sdt=6,33
An intermediate level skier was part of a group lesson on a slope simultaneously being used by more advanced skiers. He is hit by one the advanced skiers, and suffers severe injuries. The court overturned the verdict for the defendent ski area because the trial court failed to re-read the following instruction to the jury when requested:
"Defendants are guilty of negligence if they did not use the ordinary care of a reasonably prudent person in the operation, management and control of the ski school in which plaintiff James Davis was a student. You are instructed that defendants are not relieved of liability for negligence in the operation, management and control of said ski school by any intervening act of another which caused injury to plaintiff James Davis if the intervening act was reasonably foreseeable by defendants. Where the intervening act is reasonably foreseeable the chain of causation is not broken and the original actors remain liable."
Again, this is not dispositive of the issue here. And you may think the law on this point is wrong-headed. But at least one court was willing to accept this as valid interpretation of a ski school's duties to its students.
http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=2425812637398516936&q=%22ski+school%22&hl=en&as_sdt=6,33
An intermediate level skier was part of a group lesson on a slope simultaneously being used by more advanced skiers. He is hit by one the advanced skiers, and suffers severe injuries. The court overturned the verdict for the defendent ski area because the trial court failed to re-read the following instruction to the jury when requested:
"Defendants are guilty of negligence if they did not use the ordinary care of a reasonably prudent person in the operation, management and control of the ski school in which plaintiff James Davis was a student. You are instructed that defendants are not relieved of liability for negligence in the operation, management and control of said ski school by any intervening act of another which caused injury to plaintiff James Davis if the intervening act was reasonably foreseeable by defendants. Where the intervening act is reasonably foreseeable the chain of causation is not broken and the original actors remain liable."
Again, this is not dispositive of the issue here. And you may think the law on this point is wrong-headed. But at least one court was willing to accept this as valid interpretation of a ski school's duties to its students.
MadMadWorld
Active member
1960 really? No skiing hasn't changed at all since then....
My question was not whether you would sue. My question was whether you think it is legally relevant to the resort's liability that you had hired a guide whose job involved keeping you out of a crevasse. Clearly you do not have to sue everyone who breaches a duty to you. As people in this thread have stated, litigiousness in this society is out of hand. I think the courts generally do a good job of tossing frivolous suits. But for every greedy opportunist who thinks spilling a hot cup of coffee is their ticket to the good life, there are other people who have suffered very real and very serious injuries at the hands of someone who had a duty to prevent or mitigate the risk of those injuries and failed to do so. Again, your guide could have done everything right, in which case your ending up in the crevasse is plain bad luck. But that does not mean that the resort does not have a higher standard of care to live up to when someone hires a guide whose job it is to show them where to avoid hidden hazards.
So skiing has become less dangerous since then? More dangerous? What are the legally relevant changes? You do realize that most of our commonlaw duties date back hundreds of years?
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mattchuck2
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Sad that you've spent so much time typing posts for this thread. Sadder for whatever poor client you billed this time to.
How can this still be going on?
Dome thinks they gave the lesson in a dangerous spot. A lot of people disagree.
That's really all there is to this.
I think Dome's point is pretty clear and valid - if for example you sign your kid up for a lesson, and the teach takes the beginning group up the tram, and down the face chutes, and a few kids tumble and break their arms, and another kid is run over by a few skiers doing it right, who didn't expect to see a kid at the bottom, sure I would agree, the resort is liable.
If you take a beginning group out on Outer Limits at K, sure.. negligent. Duck a rope with a kid and he get's hurt, negligent. I mean, there are all kinds of scenarios….
But as it stands, given what I know of the location, seems to me to be a reasonable place to give a group lesson, and I can't think of what reasonable step the resort could have taken to prevent the accident.
I suspect the folks suing realize this and that is why they want to attach the snow boarder to Jay Peak, so as to claim the resort's negligence wasn't from the lesson but rather from the behavior of an employee.
Dome thinks they gave the lesson in a dangerous spot. A lot of people disagree.
That's really all there is to this.
I think Dome's point is pretty clear and valid - if for example you sign your kid up for a lesson, and the teach takes the beginning group up the tram, and down the face chutes, and a few kids tumble and break their arms, and another kid is run over by a few skiers doing it right, who didn't expect to see a kid at the bottom, sure I would agree, the resort is liable.
If you take a beginning group out on Outer Limits at K, sure.. negligent. Duck a rope with a kid and he get's hurt, negligent. I mean, there are all kinds of scenarios….
But as it stands, given what I know of the location, seems to me to be a reasonable place to give a group lesson, and I can't think of what reasonable step the resort could have taken to prevent the accident.
I suspect the folks suing realize this and that is why they want to attach the snow boarder to Jay Peak, so as to claim the resort's negligence wasn't from the lesson but rather from the behavior of an employee.
fbrissette
Well-known member
Correct. He simply picked the wrong example to make up his point.
what's changed since then are the ski resort liability laws which specifically insulate the resort from liability for skier on skier collisions. So that issue never gets to the jury because the resort isnt liable as a matter of law.
Why don't you just challenge me to a ski-off already. That's the corollary to Godwin's Law for ski forums, isn't it?
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