Wilkins v. Sawyer

11 Citing cases

  1. Spriesterbach v. Holland

    215 Cal.App.4th 255 (Cal. Ct. App. 2013)   Cited 27 times   1 Legal Analyses
    In Spriesterbach, the Court of Appeal reviewed whether it was appropriate for the trial court to instruct the jury that "riding a bicycle on the sidewalk in the opposite direction of the street traffic violated the Vehicle Code and, therefore, was negligent per se."

    Thus, the court said, it could not find that plaintiff was negligent as a matter of law or that the evidence would not support a judgment in her favor. (Ibid.) The court reached a similar result in Wilkins v. Sawyer (1965) 232 Cal.App.2d 458, 42 Cal.Rptr. 817 ( Wilkins ). There, a collision occurred between the plaintiff, who was driving on a public road, and the defendant, who entered that road from a private driveway.

  2. People v. Nichols

    8 Cal.App.5th 330 (Cal. Ct. App. 2017)   Cited 17 times

    In civil cases, even where a defendant's negligence is offset by the comparative negligence of a plaintiff, if there are multiple plaintiffs, the recovery of other, non-negligent plaintiffs is not reduced for imputed or comparative negligence. For example, in Wilkins v. Sawyer (1965) 232 Cal.App.2d 458, 462, 42 Cal.Rptr. 817 (Wilkins ), the court held that where both drivers in a two-car collision were negligent, but the passenger in one car was "clearly innocent of wrong," the driver's comparative negligence would not bar the passenger's right to recover for her personal injuries. The other issues identified by the Dehle court were: "whether it was just to deny [the wife] restitution for her attorney fees in the underlying action against the insurance carrier because her attorney refused to produce his billing records; whether the proper measure of [the wife]'s economic loss was the loss of [the victim]'s gross income to age 67, adjusted as it was by [the wife]'s expert witness, or something less than that, such as [the victim]'s taxable income; whether it was appropriate to reduce [the victim]'s gross income by 30 percent per year based on an estimate of his personal consumption; and whether the victim restitution statutes allow for or require compensation for the loss of a decedent's services around th

  3. Lantis v. Condon

    95 Cal.App.3d 152 (Cal. Ct. App. 1979)   Cited 47 times
    Holding that because loss of consortium is not a derivative cause of action, wife's award would not be reduced for husband's contributory negligence in causing his injury

    If the injury she suffered were a broken leg while riding in a vehicle driven by her contributorily negligent husband, there would be no question but that his contributory negligence would not destroy or mitigate her right to full recovery. ( Wilkins v. Sawyer (1965) 232 Cal.App.2d 458, 462 [ 42 Cal.Rptr. 817].) There is no reason why injury to her psychological and emotional state should be treated any differently than injury to her physical well being.

  4. Estate of Rogers

    24 Cal.App.3d 69 (Cal. Ct. App. 1972)   Cited 3 times

    (Cf. Workman v. City of San Diego (1968) 267 Cal.App.2d 36, 41 [ 72 Cal.Rptr. 509]; Hooper v. Romero (1968) 262 Cal.App.2d 574, 579 [ 68 Cal.Rptr. 749]; Wilkins v. Sawyer (1965) 232 Cal.App.2d 458, 462 [ 42 Cal.Rptr. 817].) He concludes this argument as follows: "[T]he assets which may be traced to the personal injury settlement of the present decedent are conceded to be community property at the date of death.

  5. Hooper v. Romero

    262 Cal.App.2d 574 (Cal. Ct. App. 1968)   Cited 7 times

    The enactment of section 163.5 of the Civil Code gave a wife a right of recovery against a negligent third party even when her spouse was guilty of contributory negligence inasmuch as the damages awarded in a civil action for personal injuries were statutorily declared to constitute the separate property of the married person injured; hence, contributory negligence of the driver-husband does not bar the right of the passenger-wife to recover from the other driver for personal injuries sustained by the wife. ( Wilkins v. Sawyer, 232 Cal.App.2d 458, 462 [ 42 Cal.Rptr. 817].) [2] The enactment of section 163.5 of the Civil Code making a recovery for personal injuries by a married person his or her separate property was for the express purpose of eliminating as a defense the negligence of the injured person's spouse.

  6. Safirstein v. Nunes

    241 Cal.App.2d 416 (Cal. Ct. App. 1966)   Cited 5 times

    The fact that an accident happened is not a demonstration that the vehicle on the through highway was a hazard in the legal sense at the time the approaching driver made his observation. ( Wilkins v. Sawyer, 232 Cal.App.2d 458, 463 [ 42 Cal.Rptr. 817]; Malinson v. Black, 83 Cal.App.2d 375, 378 [ 188 P.2d 788].) [2] The mere occurrence of an accident in a protected intersection does not in and of itself raise a presumption of negligence against the unprotected driver.

  7. Scott v. Texaco, Inc.

    239 Cal.App.2d 431 (Cal. Ct. App. 1966)   Cited 11 times

    Considering that it was 11 o'clock at night, that the Texaco truck weighed 34 tons, that the road was a blind curve with a downhill slope, that the truck could not have stopped in less than 210 feet at the speed it was traveling, the jury might have found the driver of the Texaco truck to have been negligent. ( Wilkins v. Sawyer, 232 Cal.App.2d 458, 464-465 [ 42 Cal.Rptr. 817].) In that event instructions defining the status of a rescuer and the circumstances under which she could recover would have become pertinent to the jury.

  8. Reid v. United States

    447 F.2d 275 (6th Cir. 1971)

    He by his own testimony, did nothing to avoid the collision from that point on. He did not honk his horn; he did not look to see if he could back up; he merely sat there and let her maneuver through a left turn with all the demands that were made on her in making the left turn and watching for other traffic, and he did nothing. We hold that the District Court's conclusion that Spight's action — or inaction — did not comport with the behavior of a reasonable person under the circumstances is not erroneous. Wilkins v. Sawyer, 232 Cal.App.2d 458, 42 Cal.Rptr. 817, 821 (1965), and Coleman v. Byrnes, 34 Tenn. App. 680, 242 S.W.2d 85, 89 (1950), cited by the Government, are not apposite since in those cases the defendants did not have time and opportunity to take action which might have prevented a collision. Here, the District Court found that Spight's failure to take steps to avoid the collision was negligence and contributed proximately to the accident.

  9. Gaipo v. Gaipo

    102 R.I. 28 (R.I. 1967)

    Moreover, even if we were to take judicial notice of the law of California, it would be of no avail to plaintiff because, as defendant points out in his brief and, indeed, as plaintiff conceded in oral argument, the statutory law in that state is that "All damages, special and general, awarded a married person in a civil action for personal injuries, are the separate property of such married person." California Civil Code, 1961, § 163.5; Lichtenauer v. Dorstewitz, 19 Cal.Rptr. 654, 200 Cal.App.2d 777; Cooke v. Tsipouroglou, 31 Cal.Rptr. 60, 381 P.2d 940; Wilkins v. Sawyer, 232 Cal.App.2d 458, 42 Cal.Rptr. 817. We do not reach the question, also briefed by the defendant, of whether the service of trustee process upon Bowes and Aetna, prior to the expiration of the period within which an appeal could have been taken from the judgment, gave it that degree of finality which made it susceptible to garnishment within the rule of Cappelli v. Wood, 27 R.I. 411.

  10. Salem v. Shih

    No. B326152 (Cal. Ct. App. Apr. 26, 2024)

    To have held him guilty of an unexcused violation of the section under the circumstances, the jury would have had to find that no one could possibly nonnegligently enter that road from that driveway at least without having first posted a lookout sufficiently far down the road to warn of the possibility of approaching . . . traffic beyond any entrant's range of vision." (Wilkins v. Sawyer (1965) 232 Cal.App.2d 458, 462-463; see also Spriesterbach v. Holland (2013) 215 Cal.App.4th 255, 266 [quoting Wilkins].)