Hines v. Safeway Stores, Inc.

How courts have described this case

Verbatim parenthetical descriptions written by other courts when citing this decision. Ranked by citation-network relevance.

• explaining that negligence is “peculiarly within the province of juries” and declining to set aside a jury’s conclusion that a store’s failure to clean a large puddle after twenty minutes was negligent, even without evidence that the store knew about the puddle
• collecting cases in which the existence of a dangerous condition in a well-traveled public place—specifically, a foreign object on the floor of a market—lasting for as little as three to five minutes presented a question for the factfinder on the issue of constructive notice
• question of constructive notice is one peculiarly within the province of the jury
• “constructive notice is but a shorthand way of saying that shopkeepers are under a duty to police their premises with enough frequency to prevent the existence of dangerous conditions for unreasonably prolonged periods.”
• “[P]roof of the period of time during which a condition might have existed does not permit an inference that the condition did exist during that entire period or any substantial part of it.” (emphasis added)

Source: CourtListener parenthetical corpus (CC0).