Matlock

Why is it, Dean Prosser once asked, that “ ‘so many of us’ ” feel that the famous Palsgraf case was “ ‘correctly decided, and that Mrs. Palsgraf should not recover?’ ” (See People v. Roberts (1992) 2 Cal.4th 271, 319 [ 6 Cal.Rptr.2d 276 , 826 P.2d 274 ], quoting Prosser, Palsgraf Revisited (1953) 52 Mich. L.Rev. 1, 27.) Is it not that what happened was “‘too preposterous . . . [t]he combination of events and circumstances necessary to injure her... too improbable?’ ” (Ibid.) The present appeal is not exactly Palsgraf all over again, but there is enough of a family resemblance to warrant a reversal of a judgment in favor of the plaintiff.

I

Timothy Matlock, age seventeen, bought two packs of cigarettes from a gas station one day in April 1993. Tim gave one of the packs to his friend, Eric Erdley, age fifteen. Smoking as they walked, the two trespassed onto a private storage facility in Huntington Beach, where a couple of hundred telephone poles were stacked up high upon the ground, held in place by two vertical poles sticking out of the ground. The two had climbed on the logs many times before.

Timothy and Eric were joined by 2 younger boys, about 10 or 11 years old,…