Article by Capehart Scatchard

Plaintiff Carlos Rodriguez, a garage utility worker for the New York City Department of Sanitation, was standing between a parked car and a rack of tires when a sanitation truck, which was trying to back into a garage, crashed into the front of the parked car, propelling it into plaintiff and pinning him up against the tires.  The plaintiff sued the City of New York for negligence and moved for partial summary judgment on liability.  The Supreme Court denied plaintiff’s motion and the First Department of the Appellate Division affirmed, finding that plaintiff had failed to make a prima facie showing that he was free of comparative negligence.  The question in Rodriguez v. City of New York, 31 N.Y.3d 312 (2018), was whether plaintiffs moving for partial summary judgment in a comparative negligence action must establish the absence of their own comparative negligence.

The Court of Appeals answered this question in the negative: “To be entitled to partial summary judgment[,] a plaintiff does not bear the double burden of establishing a prima facie case of defendant’s liability and the absence of his or her own comparative fault.”  Rodriguez, 31 N.Y.3d at 315, 324-25.  In so holding, the Court of Appeals recognized that under New York’s comparative negligence statute, a plaintiff’s culpable conduct “shall not bar recovery” because it “is not a defense to any element (duty, breach, causation) of plaintiff’s prima facie cause of action for negligence”; rather, such conduct only serves to diminish “the amount of damages otherwise recoverable.”  Id. at 317-19.  The Court also noted that since a plaintiff’s culpable conduct is an affirmative defense to be pleaded and proved by the party asserting it, a rule requiring plaintiffs to disprove their culpability would flip the burden of proof and would thus be inconsistent with the plain language of the comparative negligence statute.  See id. at 318.  The Court found that such an outcome would not be consistent with the legislative history of the comparative negligence statute, which indicated that the law was designed to bring “New York law into conformity with the majority rule and represent[ed] the culmination of the gradual but persistent erosion of the rule that freedom from contributory negligence must be pleaded and proven by the plaintiff.”  Id. at 321.