Court Decides Tort Claims Act Cases

Judge Wecker went on to find that the temporal separation between the finding of the firework and the actual explosion was irrelevant because the dangerous condition prompted a predictable chain of events that ended in the injury. Finding support in the TCA, Judge Wecker stated:

Another way to express my view of the first required element of the cause of action for the injury resulting from a dangerous condition of public property is to consider the word ‘injury’ in this section more broadly than immediate physical injury and to include harmful ‘contact’ or ‘exposure’ that sets into motion a predictable, if not inevitable, resulting injury.

Because of the dissent, plaintiff exercised its right to appeal to the Supreme Court. Justice Virginia Long, writing for the majority, reviewed the history of the TCA, noting that its purpose was to respond to the abrogation of sovereign immunity as articulated by the Supreme Court in Willis v. Department of Conservation and Economic Development, 55 N.J. 534, 537-38 (1970). She observed that the dominant theme of the TCA was to re-establish the immunity of all governmental bodies in New Jersey, subject only to the TCA’s specific liability provisions.

The pivotal question from the Supreme Court’s vantage point was whether the requirement that the property be in a dangerous condition at the time of the injury was satisfied even though plaintiff was injured on private property after removing the firework from public property. The Supreme Court noted that ironically, an investigator for the plaintiff found another unexploded firework in the park subsequent to the injury to the plaintiff and thus contended that the municipal property was still in a “dangerous condition” at the time of the injury even though that “newly discovered” unexploded firework was not the cause of the injury to the plaintiff. However, rather than relying upon that circumstance to establish liability, the Supreme Court addressed the broader question and ignored the technicality that the public property was actually still in a dangerous condition at the time of the explosion, albeit unrelated to the injury caused to plaintiff. In order to find the answer to the question within the four corners of the TCA, Justice Long cited Chief Justice Joseph Weintraub’s explication of legislative drafting:

It is frequently difficult for a draftsman of legislation to anticipate all situations and to measure his words against them. Hence cases inevitably arise in which a literal application of the language used would lead to results incompatible with the legislative design. It is the proper function, indeed the obligation, of the judiciary to give effect to the obvious purpose of the Legislature, and to that end, ‘words used may be expanded or limited according to the manifest reason and obvious purpose of the law. The spirit of the legislative direction prevails over the literal sense of the terms.’ Alexander v. New Jersey Power & Light, 21 N.J. 373, 378 (1956); Wright v. Vogt, 7 N.J. 1, 6 (1951); Glick v. Trustees of Free Public Library, 2 N.J. 579, 584 (1949); Smith, 180 N.J. at 216.