City of Huntington Beach v. City of Westminster

For $250,000 the Cities of Huntington Beach and Westminster settled a lawsuit brought by a robbery victim who was accidentally bitten by a police dog, but the cities could not agree on an allocation of the loss between them. The trial court somehow found neither city at fault, but nonetheless applied the doctrine of equitable indemnity to require one city to completely indemnify the other. “That dog,” as we say out west, “won’t hunt.”

There is no equitable basis for a total shifting of a loss from one fault-free party to another. The cities have not cited any statute or agreement to justify such a judicial redistribution of liability. As the court noted in Gentry Construction Co. v. Superior Court (1989) 212 Cal.App.3d 177, 180 [ 260 Cal.Rptr. 421 ], in refusing to allow one strictly liable codefendant to recover full indemnity from a second strictly liable codefendant, “ ‘Judicial paternalism is to loss shifting what garlic is to a stew—sometimes necessary to give full flavor to statutory law, always distinctly noticeable in its result, overwhelmingly counterproductive if excessive, and never an end in itself.’ ”

We will conclude the statutory right of contribution…