Chavez

DISCUSSION

Defendant misperceives the scope of a landowner’s duty to prevent harm to others. California law does not hold a landowner free of liability for any and all harm occurring off the landowner’s property. The Supreme Court opinion in Rowland v . Christian (1968) 69 Cal.2d 108 (Rowland) established that the contemporary premises liability test

2 is whether the landowner acted as a reasonable person in managing the property in view of the probability of injury to others. Liability is decided by balancing a number of considerations. “[T]he major ones are the foreseeability of harm to the plaintiff, the degree of certainty that the plaintiff suffered injury, the closeness of the connection between the defendant’s conduct and the injury suffered, the moral blame attached to the defendant's conduct, the policy of preventing future harm, the extent of the burden to the defendant and consequences to the community of imposing a duty to exercise care with resulting liability for breach, and the availability, cost, and prevalence of insurance for the risk involved.” (Id. at pp. 112-113.) There is no free pass on liability for injury occurring off site of the premises owned by…