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273 Mich. 295

262 N.W 915

Lagassee v. Quick

Michigan Supreme Court

Decided October 30, 1935

Michigan Supreme Court · decided 1935-10-30

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Decided 1935-10-30

How this case has been cited

Cited by 4 later decisions — most recently March 1967

1 federal appellate · 3 state decisions

101935194019501960decided

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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North, J.

¶1 (concurring in reversal). I concur in the result reached by Mr. Justice Wiest; but I am not in accord with that portion of his opinion wherein he states:

“Upon this claim (that plaintiff by suddenly jumping or' stepping back into the path of the auto *300 mobile created an emergency) defendant requested an instruction that, under such a sudden emergency, negligence should not be found merely because the driver did not, when so confronted, adopt a different course to avoid the accident. The claimed emergency, under the driver’s testimony, was not wholly created by act of plaintiff. ’ ’

¶2 To hold that the emergency, if so caused, “was not wholly created by act of plaintiff,” is in effect to hold as a matter of law that the driver of the automobile was guilty of some negligence which caused or contributed as a cause to ,the emergency. Under this record his negligence was a question of fact. If the emergency was caused wholly by the act of plaintiff, the defendant was entitled to have the request given, at least in substance, as preferred. The trial court might well have balanced his charge to the jury by also stating that in case the jury found as a fact that the driver was guilty of negligence which helped to bring about the emergency, then he was not entitled to the benefit of the requested charge. Since a new trial is granted, I think the, law as stated above should be embodied in our opinion.

Potter, C. J., and Fead, Btjtzel, Bushnell and Edward M. Sharpe, JJ., concurred with North, J. The late Justice Nelson Sharpe took no part in this decision.
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