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P.G. v. State6/30/2000
ily and his relationship to his family;
4. mportant life experiences and relationships which may affect the child's feelings, behavior, attitudes, or adjustment;
5. edical history, to include third party coverage which may be available to the child;
6. education history, to include present grade placement, special strengths, weaknesses.[ ]
Under these standards, the information at issue in the present case -- school performance and disciplinary records, relevant information from recent psychological evaluations, and past family and placement history -- falls squarely within the range of disclosable information.
2. Foreseeabiliy of alleged harm caused by Billy.
The superior court's primary basis for granting summary judgment was that Billy's actions were not foreseeable:
Referring to certain language in DFYS guidelines, Plaintiffs suggest that . . . "but for" the failure of DFYS to communicate such information, the injuries would not have occurred. The simplicity of such a theory has certain visceral appeal. But it is not one upon which the liability of DFYS can be predicated. Based upon all information available to DFYS at the time of placement, it was not foreseeable that [Billy] would engage in assaultive behavior towards the foster children. (Footnote omitted.)
We often use the concept of foreseeability to determine the existence of a duty: if no harm is foreseeable from the defendant's conduct, then no duty is owed. Yet here the superior court explicitly assumed that DFYS did owe a duty to the Greens, so its finding of unforeseeability necessarily addressed issues of causation and negligence rather than duty.
We have upheld summary judgment on questions of tort duty when "the undisputed facts support only one reasonable inference." But "in cases where no one disputes the existence of a duty running from one party to another, we have disfavored summary adjudication of the precise scope of that duty, or of whether particular conduct did or did not breach it (i.e., constitute negligence)." Yet, in this case, the state urges us to uphold the superior court's ruling because none of the allegedly undisclosed information here pointed specifically to the possibility that Billy might assault the Greens' children:
It does not matter whether the predictive quality of the unfurnished information is analyzed in terms of whether there was a duty to reveal that information, whether the State breached any informative duty, or whether ignorance of the information was a proximate cause of the harm to the [Green] children. Regardless of the legal category to which foreseeability is assigned, the outcome is the same. Even assuming that the State should have known of and disclosed the information, disclosure would not have made [Billy's] assaultive behavior foreseeable.
In pressing this argument, the state relies heavily on this court's recent decision in Dinsmore-Poff v. Alvord. There, the parents of a young homicide victim sued the parents of his assailant --a seventeen-year-old boy with a history of juvenile crime -- for negligent supervision; in affirming summary judgment against the plaintiffs, we acknowledged that the assailant's parents were on notice of his general propensity for assaultive behavior, but we held that to prevail on a negligent supervision claim,
a plaintiff must show more than a parent's general notice of a child's dangerous propensity. A plaintiff must show that the parent had reason to know with some specificity of a present opportunity and need to restrain the child to prevent some imminently foreseeable harm. General knowledge of past
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