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161 Mass. 332

Meservey v. Lockett

Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court · decided 1894-05-17

Tort, for injuries occasioned to the plaintiff by being knocked down by a horse driven by the defendant. At the trial in the Superior Court, before Dewey, J., there was evidence tending to show that on June 10, 1891, at about half-past eleven o’clock in the evening, the plaintiff, while crossing on foot a street called West Chester Park, in the city of Boston, was knocked down and injured by a horse attached to a buggy driven by the defendant.

Relies on Broult v. Hanson · Norris v. Saxton

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Decided 1894-05-17

How this case has been cited

Cited by 4 later decisions — most recently November 1911

4 state decisions

20189419001910decided

Later decisions citing this case, by decade. The current decade is in progress, and our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so the latest bars are undercounted — not a real decline.

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Morton, J.

¶1We think that the instructions given by the presiding justice were correct, and were all that the case required, *335and that those requested by the plaintiff were properly refused. The instructions requested by the plaintiff were based upon the view that the defendant was negligent, or violated the law of the road in being where he was. Neither proposition is correct. So far as concerned the plaintiff, the defendant had a right to be where he was, and violated no law of the road by being there. Lloyd v. Ogleby, 5 C. B. (N. S.) 667. Cotterill v. Starkey, 8 C. & P. 691. Lovejoy v. Dolan, 10 Cush. 495. Broult v. Hanson, 158 Mass. 17. Norris v. Saxton, 158 Mass. 46. So far as the defendant’s negligence was concerned, the presiding justice properly instructed the jury that-they were to “take into account where he was, where his horse and carriage were on the street, in connection with everything else, in determining whether he was driving with reasonable and ordinary care.” It would have been error to instruct that his being on the left of the centre of the road was of itself evidence of negligence, or tended of itself to show negligence as against the plaintiff. Cases ubi supra, and Parker v. Adams, 12 Met. 415, 419.

¶2Exceptions overruled.

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