A woman who was injured at a supermarket by a box full of jars of soy sauce may have committed a “technical error” in naming the grocer’s parent company as a defendant in her lawsuit, a Lackawanna County judge said, but that does not entitle the parent company to an exit from the litigation.
In denying Wakefern Food Corp.’s motion for summary judgment, however, Court of Common Pleas Judge Carmen D. Minora granted the injured woman leave to amend her complaint to name PRRC Inc. a wholly owned subsidiary of Wakefern as defendant. In a 12-page opinion refusing to dismiss Wakefern from Soltis v. Wakefern Food Corp., Minora invoked an unreported federal decision out of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, a 47-year-old state Supreme Court case and a near-century-old U.S. Supreme Court decision, all dealing with the parent-subsidiary relationship.
