The attractive nuisance doctrine (1)

The petitioner, in this case, asked the court to hold a hotel liable for damages. Based on the facts, the petitioner’s family, which included his minor children, checked into the hotel.  Both children, then aged five and three, sustained injuries when they used the hotel’s swimming pool. This even entailed admission to the hospital sometime later for one of the children. 

Since the hotel denied the petitioner’s demand for damages, he haled the hotel into court. The trial court, however, did not see it his way. It found no causal relationship between the use of the swimming pool and the children’s injuries. The petitioner brought the issue up to the higher courts. The appellate courts, however, still upheld the lower court’s findings.  Undaunted, the petitioner elevated the issue to the Supreme Court. Just when you would think things seemed pretty bleak for the petitioner, the Supreme Court heard his plea and ruled in his favor.    

“Article 2176 of the Civil Code provides that ‘whoever by act or omission causes damage to another, there being fault or negligence, is obliged to pay for the damage done. Such fault or negligence, if there is no pre­-existing contractual relation between the parties, is called a quasi-delict[.]’ It governs instances of ‘wrongful or negligent act or omission which creates a vinculum juris and gives rise to an obligation between two persons not formally bound by any other obligation[.]’  xxx xxx To sustain a case for quasi-delict, petitioner must establish the following requisites: ‘(a) damage suffered by the plaintiff; (b) fault or negligence of the defendant; and, (c) connection of cause and effect between the fault or negligence of the defendant and the damage incurred by the plaintiff.’  xxx xxx Here, there is no dispute on the existence of the first requisite. The trial courts and the Court of Appeals are all in agreement that the petitioner’s children sustained injuries while they were at the respondent’s premises.

“However, they dismissed petitioner’s plea for damages on the ground that he allegedly failed to prove respondent’s negligence and the proximate cause between the injuries his children sustained and the alleged negligence that respondent committed. xxx xxx

“Despite the lower courts’ findings, petitioner demands liability on respondent’s part, citing as his basis the doctrines of attractive nuisance and res ipsa loquitur.

“First discussed in Taylor v. Manila Electric Railroad and Light Co.,59 the doctrine of attractive nuisance, which is of American origin, states:

“Drawn by curiosity and impelled by the restless spirit of youth, boys here as well as there will usually be found wherever the public permitted to congregate. The movement of machinery, and indeed anything which arouses the attention of the young and inquiring mind, will draw them to the neighborhood as inevitably as does the magnet draw the iron which comes within the range of its magnetic influence.

“The owners of premises, therefore, whereon things attractive to children are exposed, or upon which the public are expressively or impliedly permitted to enter to, or upon which the owner knows or ought to know children are likely to roam about for pastime and in play, ‘must calculate upon this, and take precautions accordingly.’”

(To be continued)