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P.G. v. State6/30/2000
misconduct is, in other words, necessary but not sufficient for liability.[ ]
But Dinsmore-Poff and the other similar cases upon which the state relies are readily distinguishable from the present case; the cause of action that they address is negligent supervision, a narrow theory of liability predicated on the supervisory duty over children that parents owe to the community at large. As we emphasized in Dinsmore-Poff, the Restatement of Torts limits this cause of action to cases in which a parent "knows or has reason to know that [the parent] has the ability to control child, and . . . knows or should know of the necessity and opportunity for exercising such control." In requiring specific knowledge of "imminently foreseeable harm," our opinion in Dinsmore-Poff did not construe or narrow the traditional foreseeability standard; rather, it interpreted and applied the Restatement's "necessity and opportunity" requirement -- a substantive element of a negligent supervision claim.
By contrast, we deal here not with a negligent supervision claim or with a general supervisory duty that the state owes to the public, but rather with the more specific duty of due care that DFYS owes prospective foster parents -- a duty arising from the special relationship that the agency creates when it enlists adults to accept foster custody and places foster children in their homes. In this situation we apply the same conventional principles of foreseeability that we normally apply to questions of causation and negligence.
We have generally recognized that a defendant's negligent conduct may be the legal or proximate cause of the plaintiff's injury if the negligent act was more likely than not a substantial factor in bringing about the injury. "The issue of proximate cause is normally a question of fact for the jury to decide and becomes a matter of law only where reasonable minds could not differ."
Negligence and causation necessarily involve foreseeable risks. But in this context foreseeability does not imply an ability to predict precise actions or injuries: "When the risk created causes damage in fact, insistence that the precise details of the intervening cause be foreseeable would subvert the purpose of that rule of law." Thus, Prosser and Keeton note that there is "quite universal agreement that what is required to be foreseeable is only the 'general character' or 'general type' of the event or the harm, and not its 'precise' nature, details, or above all manner of occurrence." Or as the Restatement puts it,
he fact that the actor, at the time of his negligent conduct, neither realized nor should have realized that it might cause harm to another of the particular kind or in the particular manner in which the harm has in fact occurred, is not of itself sufficient to prevent him from being liable for the other's harm if his conduct was negligent toward the other and was a substantial factor in bringing about the harm.[ ]
Prosser and Keeton observe that foreseeability is a question "of the fundamental policy of the law, as to whether the defendant's responsibility should extend to such results." The Restatement presents the analytical approach for answering this policy question as follows: "The actor's conduct may be held not to be a legal cause of harm to another where after the event and looking back from the harm to the actor's negligent conduct, it appears to the court highly extraordinary that it should have brought about the harm."
Our own cases follow the same approach. Its expansive view of foreseeability seldom warrants summary dismissal of a negligence claim on the ground of unforeseeability:
Perhaps th
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