Whether violating a statute against supplying alcohol to a visibly intoxicated person or a regulation against permitting intoxication and disorderly conduct in a bar constitutes negligence as a matter of law when a patron is injured in a brawl.
Holding
The statute does not supply a negligence-per-se standard for this claim, but the regulation does. The patron was entitled to a new trial.
Reasoning
A statutory or regulatory violation constitutes negligence as a matter of law when the injured person belongs to the protected class, the injury is of the kind the rule seeks to prevent, and the rule is appropriate as a standard of care in a civil damages action.
The statute forbids making alcohol available to someone who is already visibly intoxicated. The Court found it especially difficult to determine whether an additional drink caused a third party’s injury that the already-intoxicated person might have caused anyway. It therefore declined to use that prohibition as a negligence-per-se standard.
The regulation addresses a different risk: licensees may not permit visibly intoxicated people to remain on the premises or allow disorderly or abusive conduct there. Those restrictions serve the Liquor Control Act’s purpose of preventing abuses associated with saloons, including barroom disturbances that endanger patrons.
The patron was among the people the regulation was meant to protect, and injury in a barroom brawl was the kind of harm it was meant to prevent. The Court found the regulation suitable as a civil standard of care, so the trial court should not have withdrawn the allegations based on it.
Although no witness saw who injured the patron, the circumstances allowed a jury to infer that a member of the disruptive group caused his injuries and that the injuries would not have occurred had the operator complied with the regulation. Whether a violation occurred and caused the injury remained for the jury.