Legal Question in Real Estate Law in California

Our law is derived from two sources: statutes and decided cases. Well, there's also a third source of law: the Constitutions, State and Federal.

A large percentage of law affecting negligence, duties of people to keep others safe, etc., comes from decided cases, and is called "case law." I do not know of any statute (law passed by the legislature) that would specifically say "A land owner must pay the medical bills of people injured on his or her property." Indeed, this is not even a correct statement of the law.

Liability of a person, such as a property owner (or driver, or machine operator, or animal owner, etc.) to other persons, is based on a four-step analysis: (1) Did X owe a duty of care to Y? (2) Did X breach that duty? (3) Did Y suffer compensable harm? and (4) Was X's breach of duty the legal cause of Y's harm? If the answer to all four is "Yes!" then Y can probably get a money judgment against X for the harm done.

It used to be that property owners owed NO duty whatsoever to trespassers, so they could never be held liable. That has changed over the last century or two, gradually, as a result of court decisions - i.e., the viewpoint of judges - have developed.

Criminal law is heavily dependent upon statutes and the Constitution, but contract and tort law depend heavily upon the proposition that the law is found in prior decisions of the higher courts. Lawyers trying personal-injury cases might occasionally need to research and argue a statute, but generally it'll be all about what the Supreme Court held in (for example) the 2003 case of ABC v. XYZ, etc. etc.

I'd conclude by saying that property owners (or their insurance companies) will have to pay medical bills of visitors to their property only when the property owner's breach of a duty to them was a proximate cause of the injury. There is a heavy duty of care where the property is a business and the public is regularly invited in, and there is a heavy duty of care to a tenant or a social guest. However, the owner of a huge ranch in the mountains may have little or no duty toward trespassers, especially where the hazard that caused the injury was not known to the property owner.

Actually Mr. Whipple is quite wrong in several respects, but I'll only address a few. First, California Tort Law, including premises liability, is founded on statutes (law passed by the legislature), not "case law" as Mr. Whipple puts it (correctly called "common law"). California Civil Code section 1714 (a law passed by the legislature) states in relevant part: Everyone is responsible, not only for the result of his or her willful acts, but also for an injury occasioned to another by his or her want of ordinary care or skill in the management of his or her property or person, except so far as the latter has, willfully or by want of ordinary care, brought the injury upon himself or herself. So while there is a great deal of common law interpreting and applying that provision to particular cases, that is the foundation of the law. The second error I will mention is that the duty of care to a tenant is only heightend for common areas of a multi-unit dewelling. For a single family home or the premises occupied by the tenants, the duty is less because the owner is not in possession and has less control or knowledge of the conditions of the premises. Third, with some exceptions where "strict liability" is applied, the owner of property must know or reasonably should have known about the condition of the property that causes the injury before liability will attach. So the example of the ranch owner is simply wrong. In fact, it is not the trespass or permission that determines that ranch owner's liability. If he knew or should have known of the hazard, liability will attach regardless of whether or not the injured party was a trespasser, but with a key exception. The exception is again statutory. Civil Code section 846 exempts property owners from liability to permissive users or trespassers for injuries incurred when the injured party enters the property for "recreational purposes" as defined in that section. There are multi-volume treatises on the law of Torts, and premises liability takes up several volumes of its own in each treatise, so I will stop there rather than try to recreate them. If you have any more specific questions, please let me know.