LYNN B. GIVENS v. CORAL HOSPITALITY-GA, LLC

A woman injured herself when she tripped over a raised patch of asphalt outside her rental cabin and sued the resort's owner for her injuries. The Court of Appeals of Georgia ruled that the resort could not be held liable because nothing blocked her view of the asphalt and she simply had not looked down. The Supreme Court of Georgia agreed to review whether that reasoning conflicted with its earlier decision in Robinson v. Kroger, which said an invitee's failure to look down does not automatically defeat her claim. Before the court could decide the underlying legal question, the parties settled and jointly asked to withdraw the appeal. The court granted that request, so the case ended without any ruling on the merits. Justice Pinson wrote separately to explain why he thinks the underlying legal question, about when a hazard is so obvious that a jury is not needed, remains important and worth revisiting in a future case.

The court granted the parties' consent motion to withdraw the appeal, so it issued no ruling on whether the Court of Appeals' 'plain view' reasoning conflicts with Robinson v. Kroger; the underlying legal question about static hazards was left unresolved.

Because the case settled, the Court of Appeals' ruling favoring property owners stands for now, and Georgia trial courts and litigants are left with an unresolved tension between that line of cases and the Supreme Court's earlier Robinson decision on slip-and-fall and trip-and-fall lawsuits.

Appeal withdrawn by consent

1. The court noted that the parties had settled the underlying premises-liability dispute and jointly asked to withdraw the appeal, which made the case moot as a vehicle for deciding the legal question presented.
2. Because there was no live dispute left for the court to resolve, granting the consent motion to withdraw was the only order needed; no analysis of the merits was required to dispose of the case.
3. In a separate concurrence, Justice Pinson explained that Georgia's premises-liability law (O.C.G.A. § 51-3-1) requires courts to ask whether the owner knew of a hazard and whether the visitor could have avoided it through ordinary care, and that courts should rarely decide the ordinary-care question as a matter of law rather than sending it to a jury.
4. Pinson observed that the Court of Appeals' reasoning here, that an unobstructed view of a hazard defeats a claim as a matter of law, closely resembled reasoning the Supreme Court had previously disapproved in Robinson v. Kroger, creating an apparent conflict in Georgia law that the settlement left unresolved.

• premises liability
• trip and fall injury
• raised asphalt
• Robinson v. Kroger
• summary judgment