A court decision that all law students who study in California are sure to run across early in thei studies is the California Supreme Court’s decision Rowland v. Christian. The facts of the case were straightforward. The plaintiff, James Rowland, was a social guest in the apartment of the defendant, Nancy Christian. While using the bathroom, Rowland injured his hand on a cracked porcelain faucet handle. (You’ve probably seen them — colorful, oversized, shiny knobs or handles that are usually a lot bigger than they need to be just to turn the bathroom sink on and off.) Rowland’s lawsuit later claimed. Christian knew the handle was cracked, and that she had even warned her landlord about the defect and asked that it be repaired.
While I have long been familiar with this case, I recently stumbled upon an article that provided a much more detailed background story on this lawsuit — far more information than one usually learns about famous court cases (well . . . famous to attorneys) than one usually gets. About the closest is a case I’ve written about before, Gideon v. Wainwright, the 1963 case from Florida in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that poor defendants have the right to state-funded counsel if they can’t afford it. The journalist Anthony Lewis researched and published an entire book about it, Gideon’s Trumpet, that also gave a rare follow-up to “the rest of the story” that one rarely gets about noteworthy lawsuits. In the case of Rowland, a law professor, Robert L. Rabin acted more like a journalist himself, tracking down Nancy Christian and other folks who were involved in the original case to interview them about 25 years ago. Despite being one of the named parties, by the early 2000s when Christian was contacted by Rabin, she barely remembered the incident, but eventually gave her account of what she remembered.
What Rabin turned up is that in November, 1963, Rowland was going to take a flight to Portland, Oregon. He was reluctant to park at the airport, however, and visited the home of a friend to ask if he could park in front of his friend’s apartment building instead. His friend wasn’t home, but Rowland remembered that Nancy Christian, who also lived in the building, was a mutual acquaintance and his friend might be there.
The friend turned out not be with her, either, but when she learned what he wanted, she offered to drive him to the airport herself. They had a drink and he asked to use the bathroom. While turning the faucet handle in her bathroom, however, it broke apart and the sharp ceramic edge cut the palm of his hand so badly that it severed nerves and tendons. Needless to say, Rowland missed his plane, instead spending much of the day at the local hospital.
Don’t you just hate it when that happens? Of course, Rowland sued poor Nancy Christian, demonstrating yet again that no kindness goes unpunished.
Under the law at that time, recovery for injury caused by a problem with the condition of an apartment depended on whether the injured person was the customer of a business (usually got compensation), or a social guest like Rowland (very limited legal protection) or a t
espasser (the person got almost no protection). These classifications almost always determined the outcome of a court case. Because Rowland was a social guest, the case was dismissed.
The California Supreme Court used this case to abolish those distinction, and instead concluded that this system was arbitrary and unjust. Instead, the court decided to create a list of various factors (judges love lists of factors) to determine whether a given plaintiff got a recovery or not.
The practical effect of Rowland was that property owners no longer received protection simply because an injured person happened to be a social guest (or a trespasser). Instead, courts now have to determine whether the property owner acted reasonably, and while a person’s status was one of those new “factors,” it didn’t determine the outcome.
Professor Rabin also learned that after the decision, Rowland eventually settled with the insurance company (a rarity at the time, Nancy Christian actually had renter’s insurance) and probably with the owner of the building as well. Though the exact amount is lost to history — this was almost 60 years ago, after all — one of the attorneys still alive around 2000 when he did his research remembered that, as was common, it was under $10,000. But $10,000 at that time was the equivalent of almost $100,000, which
should have covered Rowland’s medical bills, attorney’s fees, and a little for his pain and suffering. And thanks to Prof. Rabin, our legal history is a little more complete, too.