In Montemayor v. Sebright Products, Inc., a perfect storm of events led to the plaintiff’s devastating injuries and the lawsuit before the court. The plaintiff, a laborer for VZ Hogs, a family-owned company that raises hogs and produces hog feed, was seriously injured while attempting to manually relieve a jam in an extruder manufactured by Sebright Products, Inc. The extruder was used to crush food containers with a hydraulic ram. The liquid from the containers was siphoned off and a hydraulically powered press (plenum) crushed the containers and pushed them out of through a discharge chute and into a separate compacting machine. Montemayor was in the machine with another employee, attempting to relieve a jam, when a co-employee, unaware Montemayor was in the machine, activated it in an attempt to relieve the jam. That caused the plenum to descend on Montemayor’s legs, crushing them. Both legs had to be amputated above the knee.
Montemayor sued Sebright, alleging that the design of the extruder was defective and that the warnings on the machine were inadequate. The district court granted Sebright’s motion for summary judgment, concluding that the injury to Montemayor was not foreseeable. The court of appeals affirmed.
On appeal, the supreme court reversed in a four-three decision. Justice McKeig, writing for the court, framed the case:
In this case, two long-established rules come together. First, in a negligence case, when the issue of reasonable foreseeability of the injury is close, it should be decided by the jury. Second, on a motion for summary judgment, all facts and the inferences arising from them must be considered in the light most favorable to the non-moving party.
In a split decision, the supreme court reversed the court of appeals. Taking “the evidence and inferences in the light most favorable to Montemayor,” the court concluded that “reasonable persons might differ as to the foreseeability of Montemayor’s injury,” making it “a ‘close case’ in which foreseeability must be resolved by the jury.” Three justices dissented from that conclusion.
Montemayor is yet another in a long line of Minnesota cases dealing with the issue of foreseeability in tort law. The key issue concerned whether Sebright owed a duty to Montemayor.
The rough framework for evaluating the duty issue in negligence cases is relatively clear, at least insofar as the cases generally require a foreseeable risk of injury to a foreseeable plaintiff before a duty will be imposed on a defendant. The variance in foreseeability standards and in the application of those standards in cases involving summary judgment motions to dismiss for lack of foreseeability, complicates development of an evenhanded approach to the issue, however. It does seem to be clear that in “close cases” the foreseeability issue will be for the jury. As Montemayor illustrates, there is some disagreement about what it takes for that tag to apply.
Montemayor might be read as just one more example in the “close cases” line of decisions, or, read more broadly, it might be seen as an adjustment of the judge-jury relationship that perhaps portends a softening of the summary judgment hammer that often precludes resolution of the foreseeability issue by the trier of fact. This essay examines that issue in detail. The first part analyzes the legal framework of the majority. The second does the same with the dissenting opinion. Part three focuses on the “close cases” rubric. The court’s recent decision in Senogles v. Carlson is introduced in that discussion. That case is important to the analysis because, although it involved the duty of a landowner, the court split along the same lines as it did in Montemayor, with the majority concluding that the foreseeability of harm to an injured child was a jury issue. The fourth part considers the question of whether a jury should be specifically instructed on the foreseeability issue and if so, what such an instruction might look like. Part five considers the question of whether foreseeability should be part of the duty determination. Part six is the conclusion.