Note that this is in New Jersey, but this is how common law gets started.  One state picks a position, then other states start to take sides.  The article itself is long and full of facts, but the gist is that Bar owners in California may become liable to passengers who get into the cars of drunk drivers.  The only reason bars aren’t liable to ”other people” injured from a drunk driver is because of a California Statute.  The courts could very well find that if a person is first a patron and then is injured the bar had a duty to keep that person from getting into the car of the drunk person. 

I know…it sounds crazy, and there’s a good chance California courts will disagree, BUT we wont know until someone takes it to court on this issue. 

Are you impatient like I am? Good. Then we need to get the gears of justice turning a little faster than my one armed grandma in a wheel chair.  Time for someone to take one for the team and get hit be my car.

Volunteers?


A Remarkable New Jersey Decision Holds a Bar Broadly Responsible For
Protecting Passengers of Drunk Drivers Whom the Bar Never Served, and Who
Did Not Seem Drunk
By ANTHONY J. SEBOK
—-
Tuesday, Mar. 25, 2008
Last week, a state appellate court in New Jersey issued a remarkable
decision: It held that a bar has a duty to make sure that an intoxicated
person does not get into a car that is driven by another intoxicated
person, even if the driver did not consume alcohol in the bar or appear
intoxicated.
The logic of this decision, Bauer v. Nesbitt, takes the use of tort law
to regulate drunk driving into new and uncharted territory.

The Facts of the Case
The facts of Bauer are sad and all too familiar. James Hamby, age 21,
and Frederick Nesbitt III, age 19. began their evening by drinking beer
and rum. Later, they met three other friends (all of whom were 21 or
older) at the C View Inn in Cape May, New Jersey for “Wing Night.”
At the C View Inn, the underage Nesbitt ordered soft drinks and was not
served alcohol. At trial, there was testimony that Nesbitt received
some rum from Hamby surreptitiously “under the table,” but there was no
evidence submitted that the staff at the bar knew about this.
Furthermore, the only evidence that was introduced concerning Nesbitt’s visible
intoxication was that he was “boisterous.”
Hamby, on the other hand, was served alcohol and became extremely
drunk. He was loud, boisterous and vulgar, to the point where he displayed a
piercing that he had just received on a private part of his anatomy.
That night, Hamby accepted a ride from Nesbitt, and Nesbitt crashed his
car on the Garden State Parkway, killing Hamby. When the accident
occurred, Nesbitt’s blood alcohol level was .199 percent (almost double the
legal limit in New Jersey).
Hamby’s estate then sued Nesbitt, who is serving a five-year sentence
for negligent vehicular homicide. It also sued the C View Inn, under New
Jersey’s Dram Shop Act.
The Trial Court’s Decision to Dismiss the Suit
The trial judge dismissed the suit against the C View Inn on the ground
that the Dram Shop Act, N.J.S.A. 2A:22A-4, did not apply. Under this
statutory tort, a “licensed alcoholic beverage server shall be deemed to
have been negligent only when the server served a visibly intoxicated
person, or served a minor, under circumstances where the server knew,
or reasonably should have known, that the person served was a minor.”
The bar had not served a minor. It had, arguably, served alcohol to a
visibly intoxicated person – Hamby. However, the judge reasoned, Hamby
did not cause the accident that caused the injury; he was only a
passenger. (If he had grabbed the wheel from Nesbitt while the latter was
driving, that would have been a completely different story, but that is not
what happened, according to the court.) For the trial judge, then this
was a simple case of “no harm, no foul”–the person whom the C View
Inn served didn’t drive, and the person who drove wasn’t served by the C
View Inn.
The Appellate Court’s Decision to Reinstate the Suit
So why did the New Jersey appellate court reverse the trial judge and
return the case for trial? It gave two reasons.
First, it held that the risks that the Dram Shop Act was intended to
prevent were not just accidents resulting from drunk-driving, but also
any accidents that could foreseeably result from intoxication.
The appellate court offered a number of precedents to support its
claim. It cited, for example, the 1997 decision in Steele v. Kerrigan, where
a bar was held liable to a victim of a bar fight initiated by a minor
to whom the bar had served alcohol. It also cited the 2003 decision in
Kuehn v. Pub Zone, where a bar was held liable because it did not
protect a patron from an attack, on the bar’s premises, by a motorcycle
club. In addition, it cited the 2001 decision in Martin v. Prime
Hospitality Corp., where a bar was held liable for failing to protect an
intoxicated patron from an off-site rape by other patrons in the bar.
The problem with these cases, however, is that none of them is really
on point. To begin, Steele is the only case, among the three, that
relies on the Dram Shop Act, and it is easily distinguishable from Bauer: In
Steele, the victim was attacked by a minor to whom the bar served
alcohol. The C View Inn, as noted above, did not serve Nesbitt, the minor
who caused the car accident.
The other two key cases the New Jerseyappeals court cited, Kuehn and
Martin, have a basis that is quite different from the Dram Shop Act.
They are based on the much broader and more basic duty that a landowner
has a duty to protect a guest (whether an invitee or a licensee) from
foreseeable criminal assaults, even after the patron leaves to premises,
to the extent that the landowner could take reasonable steps to provide
protection. But, on the night in question, Nesbitt was not threatening
Hamby, at least not in the sense upon which duty was based in Kuehn and
Martin–that is, as a foreseeable criminal assailant. Had the bar been
forewarned that an angry Nesbitt might try to run down Hamby in the
parking lot, then these cases would apply.
With no precedent truly on point to support its decision, it is most
accurate to say that the appellate court created a new duty in Bauer. It
essentially held that since Hamby, the passenger, was visibly drunk,
the bar had a duty to protect him against his own bad judgment which led
him to accept a ride from Nesbitt, the driver. The problem with this
logic, however, is that while Nesbitt was too drunk to drive, and Hamby
knew it, the staff at the bar did not.
This is a very expansive duty. All the staff at the C View Inn knew was
that Hamby was very drunk. They could be assumed to know that very
drunk people make bad choices. But the staff did not know the range of bad
choices from which Hamby was choosing. They did not know, for example,
that he was choosing to drive with another person who was very drunk.
The Arguments in Favor of the Court’s New Duty
I suppose that the best argument in favor of the new duty created by
the appellate court is that the duty to protect visibly drunk patrons
can’t end at the bar – or car – door. After all, wouldn’t the bar have a
duty to stop Hamby from staggering out the door of the bar and trying to
walk home in a snowstorm?
The answer is yes–but there is a difference: The staff of the C View
Inn would or should surely have recognized the risk faced by Hamby had
he staggered into a snowstorm, drunk. Yet, given the actual facts of the
case, the court itself conceded that when Hamby chose to leave with
Nesbitt, the staff at that bar had no reason to believe that Nesbitt
could not drive safely. As far as the staff knew, the drunk Hamby was
accepting a ride with a driver who had drunk no alcohol in their bar – a far
better option that Hamby’s staggering off alone, or driving drunk
himself.
The court’s second argument for returning the case for trial is that if
a jury finds that Nesbitt was, in fact, visibly intoxicated, then the
bar had a duty to protect Hamby from Nesbitt, even if they were not
responsible for Nesbitt’s intoxication (which derived from drinks he had
consumed earlier, and/or that Hamby sneaked to him). Notice that this
argument does not depend at all on the fact that Nesbitt was a minor. It
would have the same force if Nesbitt had been Hamby’s 50 year old
father who had drunk five scotches before coming to “pick up” his son from
the C View Inn.
In my view, this second argument mounted by appellate court is only a
little more persuasive than the first. In part, that is because if
Nesbitt was visibly intoxicated, then the bar’s duty to prevent Hamby–who
was disabled by alcohol provided by the bar–from accepting Nesbitt’s
ride seems more credible.
Yet the court also insists on pushing the second argument too far. Its
argument suggests that even if Hamby were not impaired, the bar would
still have had a duty to prevent him from accepting a ride from Nesbitt,
even if Nesbitt’s impairment was a result of drinking done
off-premises. It cites, again, cases like Kuehn and Martin.
As noted above, however Kuehn and Martin involved the duty to protect
patrons from rape and assault on or near the landowner’s premises; they
did not involve the Dram Shop Act. Does the court in Bauer really want
to create a freestanding duty on landowners to protect their guests
from the reckless, drunk driving of others–especially when the offer to
drive comes from someone who did not receive alcohol from the landowner?
That rule seems to go too far, holding landowners liable when they
have not done anything wrong – effectively appointing them to police drunk
driving in their vicinity.
Bauer is a hard case, but it requires much more thought than the
current appellate court has provided. If a licensed establishment’s duty to
protect patrons from the risks associated with alcohol is to be
radically expanded–as it has been in Bauer–then the New Jersey Supreme Court
should provide much more detailed reasoning for why that result is
supported by existing law. Thus far, it has not done so.

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