Derdiarian v. Felix Contracting Corp

In Derdiarian v. Felix Contracting Corp., 51 NY2d 308 (1980), the court while stating that the issue if proximate causation is ordinarily decided by the trier of fact, nevertheless stated that when only one conclusion can be drawn from the established facts, legal cause or proximate cause can be decided by the court as a matter of law. In Derdiarian, the court denied defendant's post trial motion to set aside the verdict when defendant argued that its negligence was not the proximate cause of the accident. Id. Derdiarian involved an accident wherein plaintiff was injured after defendant driver's vehicle entered a construction site spilling hot oil on the plaintiff. Id. The evidence demonstrated that the accident occurred because defendant driver had an epileptic seizure causing the same to loose control of the car. Id. The evidence also demonstrated that defendant construction site, did not secure the site in a manner sufficient to avoid the accident. Id. The Court held that while ordinarily independent intervening acts, which break the chain of causation, are sufficient to preclude liability [w]here the acts of a third person intervene between the defendant's conduct and the plaintiff's injury, the causal connection is not automatically severed. In such case, liability turns upon whether the intervening act is a normal or foreseeable consequence of the situation created by the defendant's negligence.Id. at 315. In that case, a car coming on to the construction site, while an intervening act, was nonetheless a foreseeable and normal consequence of defendant construction site's failure to properly secure the same. Id. The Court of Appeals explained when a Court may determine proximate cause as a matter of law: Where the acts of a third person intervene between the defendant's conduct and the plaintiff's injury, the causal connection is not automatically severed. In such a case, liability turns upon whether the intervening act is a normal or foreseeable consequence of the situation created by the defendant's negligence. If the intervening act is extraordinary under the circumstances, not foreseeable in the normal course of events, or independent of or far removed from the defendant's conduct, it may well be a superseding act which breaks the causal nexus. Because questions concerning what is foreseeable and what is normal may be the subject of varying inferences, as is the question of negligence itself, these issues generally are for the fact finder to resolve. There are certain instances, to be sure, where only one conclusion may be drawn from the established facts and where the question of legal cause may be decided as a matter of law. Those cases generally involve independent intervening acts which operate upon but do not flow from the original negligence. (Id. at 315)