Article: Pennsylvania Supreme Court Shows Teasing Signs of Moderation

This article of mine was recently published in the Pennsylvania Law Weekly and is republished here with permission.

Pennsylvania Supreme Court Shows Teasing Signs of Moderation


June 01, 2023


By Daniel E. Cummins | June 01, 2023 at 11:34 AM

Over the past five years or so, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court has been issuing one decision after another, along with civil litigation rule changes, most, if not all of which, have greatly favored personal injury plaintiffs’ causes.

With these plaintiff-friendly decisions and rule changes handed down by the Supreme Court, there appeared to be no end in sight to the ability of the plaintiffs bar to continue to score drastic changes in the law in favor of efforts to secure compensation for injured parties.

However, as noted below, a couple of recent decisions by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court have tempered this sense of futility for some.

The Pendulum Shift in Favor of Plaintiffs

Over the past several years, the great number of plaintiff-friendly decisions and rule changes issued by the Supreme Court has caused the pendulum of change in Pennsylvania civil litigation precedent to swing so far in favor of plaintiffs that it seems that celebrating plaintiffs attorneys should be ducking so as not to get hit by that pendulum as the good times roll on.

One result of these plaintiff-friendly decisions by the Supreme Court has been that injured parties have realized even wider avenues to secure money in civil litigation matters. Another result is that plaintiffs have been emboldened in their settlement postures with the confidence that, under the current climate, if any legal issues in their case have to go up the appellate ladder to the Supreme Court, the plaintiff will more than likely prevail.

In terms of plaintiff-favorable rule changes in personal injury civil litigation matters, the Supreme Court has expanded the Rules of Civil Procedure relative to the proper venue for medical malpractice actions. This, as expected, has led to an increase of the filings of such cases in Philadelphia County as compared to before.

Another plaintiff-friendly change in the venue rules was handed down by the Supreme Court by way of its decision in the case of Fox v. Smith, 263 A.3d 555 (Pa. 2021). In the Fox decision, the plaintiff was successful in persuading the Supreme Court to rule that internet-based defamation claims can be filed in any county where the defamatory statements were viewed and understood as defamatory.

In another rule change, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court upped the maximum limit on the amount of money that a plaintiff can recover in money damages at trial on appeal from an arbitration proceeding.

Other recent plaintiff-friendly decisions by the Supreme Court have been described as resulting in “seismic” changes in decades-long Pennsylvania precedent. For example, in Cagey v. PennDOT, 179 A.3d 458 (Pa. 2018), the plaintiffs bar convinced the Supreme Court to overrule long-standing precedent that limited the liability exposure of PennDOT in personal injury matters. In Balentine v. Chester Water Authority, 191 A.3d 799 (Pa. 2018), the Supreme Court again assisted the plaintiffs bar in generating additional potential lawsuits by overturning 30 years of precedent that had previously upheld governmental immunity in personal injury matters in a more expansive way.

Also, in almost gleeful language in the case of Gallagher v. GEICO, 201 A.3d 131 (Pa. 2019), the Supreme Court overruled the 20 years of precedent that had previously and repeatedly upheld the validity of the household exclusion in the UIM context of personal injury automobile accident matter. As noted below, in a more recent decision on the validity of the household exclusion, that plaintiff-friendly ruling in Gallagher was found to be so inappropriately expansive in its effort to eradicate that exclusion across the board that even the high court acknowledged that it had to draw back on Gallagher a bit.

A Return to Moderation?

In two recent decisions, both of which were expected to result in plaintiff-favorable rulings, the Supreme Court surprised some with opinions that were not plaintiff-friendly.

In the case of Erie Insurance Exchange v. Mione, 289 A.3d 525 (Pa. Feb. 15, 2023), the Supreme Court, without acknowledging that it had attempted to eradicate the household exclusion in UIM cases across the board in the Gallagher v. Geico case, rejected the argument by the plaintiff that the Gallagher decision should be read as having served to invalidate the exclusion in all cases in Pennsylvania. In Mione, the court instead wrote, “We reiterate today that the holding in Gallagher was based upon the unique facts before us in that case, and that the decision there should be construed narrowly.”

The court instead confirmed in the Mione decision that the Supreme Court “continues to reject the view that household vehicle exclusions are ipso facto unenforceable.”

This decision came as a welcome surprise to some and a hopeful harbinger that the court was stepping away from its penchant for decisions that resulted in seismic, plaintiff-friendly changes to long-standing precedent in Pennsylvania law.

In the other example of a recent Supreme Court decision that seemed to indicate that the court may be signaling a return to more balanced application of long-standing law, the court addressed issues of the stacking of UIM coverage in automobile insurance personal injury actions.

In the case of first impression of Franks v. State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance, No. 42 MAP 2022 (Pa. April 19, 2023) (Op. by Mundy, J.), the court ruled that the removal of a vehicle from a multiple motor vehicle insurance policy, in which stacked coverage had been previously waived through a waiver form executed by the insured, did not require the insurance carrier to secure another written waiver of stacked coverage from the insured under Section 1738(c).

The basic rationale of the court was that Section 1738 requires insurance companies to secure a new written waiver of UIM coverage whenever an insurance policy is purchased. Here, there was a change made to an existing policy. No new policy was purchased. As such, the court found there was no requirement under a plain application of the applicable law for the insurance company to secure a new waiver form.

Might the above decisions by the plaintiff-friendly Pennsylvania Supreme Court be a signal that the pendulum had finally reached its apex and was going to start its descent back toward moderation relative to issues in personal injury civil litigation matters?

Not So Fast

On the heels of the above recent decisions indicating a possible step back toward at least moderate decisions in personal injury civil litigation matters, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court then recently issued yet another very plaintiff-friendly decision in the case of Brown v. City of Oil City, No. 6 WAP 2022 (Pa. May 16, 2023) (Op. by Todd C.J.)(Mundy, J., Dissenting). With this decision, the Supreme Court greatly expanded the ability of plaintiffs to bring lawsuits against construction contractors for personal injuries sustained on a property by allowing such claims to be brought even if the contractor had completed his work on the property years before.

In Brown, the plaintiff allegedly tripped and fell on deteriorated sections of concrete steps outside of a library, which steps had been replaced by a contractor years before the incident. The plaintiff sued the owner of the library as well as the contractors who performed work on the exterior stairs to the library.

The case went up the appellate ladder and the Pennsylvania Supreme Court addressed the scope of Section 385 of the Restatement (Second) of Torts, which is titled “Persons Creating Artificial Conditions on Land on Behalf of Possessor, Physical Harm Caused After Work Has Been Accepted.”

The issue before the court was whether Section 385 imposed liability upon a contractor to a plaintiff whenever the contractor, during the course of his or her work for a possessor of land, creates a dangerous condition on the land that injures the plaintiff, even though, at the time of the injury, the contractor was no longer in possession of the land, and the possessor of the land was aware of the dangerous condition.

After reviewing the law, the Supreme Court concluded that a contractor may indeed be subjected to liability to plaintiffs under Section 385 under such circumstances. Obviously, this decision is another one in which the Supreme Court once again increased the number of parties plaintiffs may sue and widened the scope of possible monetary recoveries for injured-party plaintiffs.

So You’re Saying There’s a Chance?

One benefit of the two recent moderate decisions issued by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court in the Mione case and the Franks case is that those decisions give rise to some uncertainty, however minimal, as to which way the Pennsylvania Supreme Court may rule on a personal injury civil litigation issue before it. While it appears that the Supreme Court will likely remain plaintiff-friendly for the foreseeable future, the two recent decisions in which the defense argument prevailed serves to restore some faith in a belief that a plaintiff-favorable decision on any given issue before the court may not be automatic.

Daniel E. Cummins is the managing partner of the Clarks Summit law firm of Cummins Law, a civil litigation practice. He also conducts mediations of civil litigation matters through Cummins Mediation Services. Cummins is also the sole creator and writer of the Tort Talk Blog (www.TortTalk.com), which is designed to provide continuing updates on important cases and trends in Pennsylvania civil litigation law. He can be reached at dancummins@CumminsLaw.net.