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387 Pa. 480

Connor v. Hawk

Supreme Court of Pennsylvania

Decided January 17, 1957

Supreme Court of Pennsylvania · decided 1957-01-17

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Decided 1957-01-17

How this case has been cited

Cited by 25 later decisions — most recently June 2010 · most notably Smith v. Bell Telephone Co. (1959), Flagiello v. Crilly (1963)

19 state decisions

1101957196019701980199020002010decided

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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¶1Dissenting Opinion by

Mb. Chief Justice Jones:

¶2Not unmindful that a nonsuit may be properly entered only where its justification is so evident that rea*484sonable men cannot differ about it, I find myself unable to join in this court’s order of reversal. The unanimous action of the court below, sitting en banc, in refusing to remove the nonsuit, which the learned trial judge granted, appears to me to be patently warranted by the record.

¶3The plaintiffs’ right to recover damages for the destruction of their store and goods by fire depended upon their proving that the fire was caused by the negligence of the defendant Hawk. All that is in the case on that score is derived by basing one presumption of fact upon another, namely, that Hawk carried a lighted cigarette into the storewindow, which he was decorating, and that the cigarette started the fire. Indeed, the presumption that he carried a cigarette into the store window was obliterated by Hawk’s positive denial in his deposition which the plaintiffs offered in evidence in their case.

¶4I would affirm the order of the court below.

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