While at common law an owner is not ordinarily obligated to provide common ways with artificial light, there is such an obligation where either defective conditions or conditions of peculiar danger exist which call for special warning. ( McCabe v. Mackay, 253 N.Y. 440, 442; Truax v. Knox, 188 App. Div. 61, 63.) Here a jury might find that there existed a condition of peculiar danger which called for a special warning. Defendant seemingly so recognized, because it maintained until one A.M. on this common way a source of illumination that made the place of the happening of the accident visible to one seeking to enter, or to emerge from the courtyard to the street.

Other jurisdictions have considered the question and have held that one is not guilty of contributory negligence or assumption of risk as a matter of law when trying to locate a light in a dark hall and falls down stairs. This is all the more true when there is an ordinance or statute which requires public passageways to be lighted. Truax v. Knox, 1919, 188 App. Div. 61, 175 N.Y.S. 772; Schabel v. Onseyga Realty Co., 1931, 233 App. Div. 208, 251 N.Y.S. 280; Maitz v. Lulewicz, 1947, 133 Conn. 355, 51 A.2d 595. Courts have been reluctant to charge one who uses unlighted stairs with assumption of risk or contributory negligence as a matter of law where a duty to light them is imposed by statute.

In the very jurisdictions which have laid down the general rule that negligence cannot ordinarily be based upon a failure to light halls and stairways, the courts have recognized an exception where, by reason of the method of construction of the building, there is presented a situation "of special danger from unusual construction, or by reason of traps and pitfalls," or, as otherwise expressed, where the passageways would not be reasonably safe in the absence of artificial light. Capen v. Hall, 21 R. I. 364, 366, 43 A. 847; Truax v. Knox, 175 N.Y.S. 772; Brugher v. Buchtenkirch, 51 N.Y.S. 464 (reversed, without passing upon this point, 167 N.Y. 153, 60 N.E. 420); McGinnis v. Keylon, 135 Wash. 588, 592, 238 P. 631; Marwedel v. Cook, 154 Mass. 235, 28 N.E. 140. With reference to this exception, it may fairly be said that, expressed in its first form, it affords no criterion sufficiently definite in itself, or by relation to recognized standards, for determining when the exceptional case arises; expressed in the second form, it limits little the application of the accepted definition of the duties of a landlord to use reasonable care to keep such passageways reasonably safe, and surely it is better to have one rule covering all cases than a rule and an exception which, in the last analysis, must amount to much the same thing.