FEDERAL COURTS STAY STRONG ON SUMMARY JUDGMENT
Motions for summary judgment are favored by defendants as an efficient mechanism for getting rid of weak claims without incurring the time and expense of a trial. Despite this advantage, courts in recent years have grown more reluctant to grant summary judgment even on claims of little apparent merit. Although this trend is more pronounced in state court, two recent decisions from Minnesota's federal court suggest that the trend away from summary judgments has begun to reverse - good news for defendants bogged down in large numbers of seemingly nuisance lawsuits.
In Grant v. J.C. Penney Corp., Civ. No. 02-4343 (RHK/RLE), the plaintiff fell down in a J.C. Penney department store after allegedly catching her shoe on an advertising sticker affixed to the store's floor. She sued the store under negligent maintenance of premises, failure to inspect, and failure to warn theories. J.C. Penney moved for summary judgment after removing the action, arguing that the stickers were waxed over with the rest of the floor and that in any case there were no stickers in the area where the plaintiff fell. Plaintiff argued that there were stickers where she fell, that they created a "difference in texture", and that they had stopped her foot from moving. The district court granted summary judgment because the plaintiff did not inspect the stickers after she fell, and was only speculating as to what must have caused the accident. The basis for the district court's decision is interesting: the plaintiff testified that she did not inspect the sticker, but it is also true that her testimony that the sticker caused the fall was unequivocal. In other words, the court granted summary judgment to the defendant in a case that many observers would have expected to go to the jury.
In Smith v. Northern Dewatering, Civ. No. 01-1948 (JNE/RLE), a truck driver sued the defendant for negligence after he was injured unloading pipes from his tractor-trailer on the theory that the defendant's end-loader bumped the trailer while the driver was inside it. The defendant brought a third-party contribution claim against the manufacturer and shipper of the pipes, Rinker Materials Polypipe, Inc, because Rinker did not use stakes to secure the pipes in the trailer. Rinker moved for summary judgment on the contribution claim on the ground that under the controlling standards for shipper liability, it could only be found liable to Smith if its failure to use stakes when loading Smith's trailer was not a defect that was discernible from ordinary observation. Smith, an experienced driver, had overseen the loading of the trailer and knew that stakes were not used. Because the court concluded that the defect was discernible from ordinary observation, summary judgment was appropriate. As in Grant, the court could easily have concluded that whether the presence of stakes was discernible was a jury issue, and denied summary judgment. Its willingness to grant summary judgment is a boon to defendants in federal court.
These decisions highlight the possibilities for favorable resolution on summary judgment that currently exist in Minnesota's federal courts. Whether they are aberrations or signal a trend toward increased summary judgment rulings for defendants, is unknown, but in either case, the decisions are welcome relief from the typical practice of permitting the jury to decide issues that call out for resolution by motion.
© 2004 Arthur, Chapman, Kettering, Smetak & Pikala, P.A.
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