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72 Conn. 404

44 A 745

Fox v. Kinney

Supreme Court of Connecticut

Decided November 28, 1899

Supreme Court of Connecticut · decided 1899-11-28

Action to recover damages for personal injuries resulting in the death of the plaintiff’s intestate, brought to the District Court of Waterbury and thence by appeal to the Superior Court in New Haven County and heard in damages to the court, Roraback, J.; facts found and judgment rendered for the plaintiff for $8,000 damages, and appeal by the de~' fendant for alleged errors in the rulings and findings of the court.

Relies on Farrell v. Waterbury Horse R. R. Co. · Hoadley v. Savings Bank

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

No error · Decided 1899-11-28

How this case has been cited

Cited by 5 later decisions — most recently December 1942

5 state decisions

20189919001910192019301940decided

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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Hamebsley, J.

¶1 The defendant is not entitled to a correction of the finding. The fact specially relied on in his exceptions is not an “ admitted or undisputed factnor is its statement in the finding necessary to present a question of law decided adversely to the appellant. Hoadley v. Savings Bank of Danbury, 71 Conn. 599, 612.

¶2 The main contention of the defendant is, that the ultimate conclusion of negligence has been drawn from specified subordinate facts which are legally incompetent to support it. In reaching this conclusion the trial court did not violate any principle of law. It assumed that it is the legal duty of a person in charge of a dangerous work at a place where many people are engaged in other work, to use reasonable care, which in such case is a high degree of care, to warn others against approaching the place of danger; and that a workman employed about the construction of a building is justified in assuming that those in charge of the different departments of work will exercise reasonable care in execution.

¶3 . The soundness of these propositions is unquestionable; and they are the only general propositions involved in the con *407 elusion of the court, unless there is involved, as claimed by the defendant, the proposition that even a conclusion of fact from subordinate facts must not violate the clearly settled rules of sound reasoning. It is true that if any of the facts found were such as to render the conclusion of negligence a palpable non sequitur, there would be error. If upon this finding the court had held that there was no negligence on the part of the defendant, there might be ground for the plaintiff to claim such decision to be absolutely inconsistent with some of the facts found; but there is no ground for the defendant’s assertion that the conclusion of negligence cannot legally be deduced from these facts. The trial court, therefore, having adopted correct general principles of law, its error, if any, must consist in ascertaining from the whole mass of evidence the precise character of the conduct-of the parties under the particular circumstances of this case, testing that conduct by what the experience of the judge teaches him men of ordinary prudence would do under similar circumstances, and in drawing the inference of liability from the conduct so ascertained. It is plain that the inference thus drawn by a trial judge, although in its nature an inference of law, cannot be reviewed; simply because it is practically inseparable from the inference of fact drawn from the evidence, and so it is impossible to put the reviewing court in the place of the trial court in respect to the facts and circumstances from which the inference is drawn.

¶4 This case comes within the rule established in Farrell v. Waterbury H. R. Co., 60 Conn. 239, 257, and in Nolan v. New York, N. H. & H. R. Co., 70 id. 159, 191. “In such cases the inference of the trial court is a conclusion upon the questions of the measure of duty and the extent of performance, which are from the nature of the case so interdependent as to constitute, for purposes of review, a single, indivisible question of fact, and the conclusion is therefore final.” Lawler v. Hartford Street Ry. Co., ante, pp. 74, 80.

¶5 There is no error in the judgment of the Superior Court.

¶6 In this opinion the other judges concurred.

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