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2007 MT 292

Czajkowski v. Meyers

Montana Supreme Court

Decided November 7, 2007

Montana Supreme Court · decided 2007-11-07

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Decided 2007-11-07

How this case has been cited

Cited by 32 later decisions — most recently July 2025 · most notably Richards v. JTL Group, Inc. (2009), Giacomelli v. Scottsdale Insurance (2009)

30 state decisions

120200720102020decided

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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JUSTICE RICE

¶1specially concurring.

¶2¶49 I concur completely with the Court’s opinion. In challenging the award of punitive damages, Czajkowskis offer that their behavior was “misunderstood” by the District Court, explaining as follows:

There exists in this case a cultural chasm. The Czajkowskis, from New Jersey, were accustomed to the gritty, raw, abrupt, in-your-*518face habits and customs of the industrial cities of the northeast. The Meyers on the other hand were accustomed to the subtler southern charms of suburban Georgia where they had a lovely acre on which to retire at the end of each day.

¶3The potential slight to New Jerseyans aside, the offensive and invasive actions of the Czajowskis in this case, which the opinion necessarily only briefly summarizes, cannot be justified by distinctions within the country’s regional cultures. I dare say that their extreme behavior would be unacceptable anywhere. And even if their experiences in the Garden State had somehow predisposed them to engage in aggressive behavior toward others, they would have been well-advised to remember ‘When in Rome ...” and other common human decencies. The District Court’s punitive damage award was very modest and very appropriate.

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