Premises Liability

Premises Liability

Premises liability asks a single question that gets complicated fast: what did the person who controlled this property owe to the person who got hurt on it? Pennsylvania and New Jersey both start from the same common-law categories — invitees, licensees, and trespassers — but the two states have drifted apart in how strictly they enforce the lines between them, and getting the category wrong at the outset of a case can mean the difference between a duty to inspect for hidden hazards and no duty at all.

Pennsylvania still follows the Restatement (Second) of Torts framework closely: a possessor of land owes an invitee (someone on the property for a purpose connected to the owner’s business, such as a customer or delivery driver) the highest duty of care, including a duty to inspect for dangers the owner doesn’t yet know about. A licensee, present with permission but not for the owner’s business purpose, is owed a duty to warn of known dangers. A trespasser is owed very little, with narrow exceptions for known trespassers and child trespassers under the attractive nuisance doctrine. New Jersey courts have moved toward collapsing the invitee/licensee distinction in several contexts, asking more broadly whether the landowner acted as a reasonably prudent person would under the circumstances — which shifts the practical fight in many New Jersey cases from “which category applies” to “what did the owner actually know, and when.”

Where These Cases Are Won and Lost

Two issues decide most premises cases before a jury ever hears about the injury itself. The first is notice: whether the property owner knew, or should have known through reasonable inspection, about the hazard that caused the fall or injury. The second is control: in a shopping center, an apartment complex, or a construction site with multiple contractors, the property owner is frequently not the only party with a duty, and identifying every party who exercised control over the specific area where the injury occurred is often what separates a full recovery from a partial one.

This is also where premises liability overlaps with several of the firm’s other negligence theories. A landlord who outsources maintenance to a property management company does not necessarily outsource its own duty of care — see Duty to People on Land and The Landlord and the Property Management Company for how that duty gets allocated. A hazard that was created by the property owner’s own conduct, rather than merely overlooked, is analyzed under Creation of the Hazard, Failure to Remedy. And whether a given risk was foreseeable enough to trigger a duty in the first place is covered in Foreseeability and the Reasonable Person Standard.