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80 Me. 119

Jackson v. Castle

Supreme Judicial Court of Maine

Decided January 28, 1888

Supreme Judicial Court of Maine · decided 1888-01-28

On report. This case was reported to the law court upon a copy of the writ, with the agreement that if the action .could he sustained upon the allegations contained in the declaration the case should stand for trial, otherwise a nonsuit, should be entered.

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Decided 1888-01-28

How this case has been cited

Cited by 4 later decisions — most recently July 1940

4 state decisions

201888189019001910192019301940decided

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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Haskell, J.

¶1Does the plaintiff’s declaration set out a cause of action ? It charges in substance that the plaintiff, being lawfully in a public street with his two horse team, suffered special damage in'the loss of a horse by reason of both horses taking fright at the defendant’s sliding in the same street with others engaged in boisterous outcries incident to their sport.

¶2Sliding in a street accompanied with boisterous conduct is not necessarily unlawful. Nor is it necessarily a public nuisance. The averment that defendant’s acts were " contrary to law ” does not help the plaintiff’s case. It is merely a conclusion that he draws from the facts stated. If the facts do not warrant it, the court cannot adopt it.

¶3Sliding in a street, accompanied with boisterous conduct calculated to frighten horses lawfully travelling therein, may be a public nuisance; but there is no such averment in the declaration. Sliding may be prohibited in streets by a city ordinance, and a violation of the same would be evidence tending to show negligence. If the plaintiff would recover, he must show negligent or unlawful conduct to be the proximate cause of his injury.

¶4Plaintiff nonsuit.

Peters, C. J., Walton, Danforth, Libbet and Emery, JJ., concurred.
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