DENVER (Legal Newsline) - A waiver prohibiting lawsuits over most types of skiing accidents doesn’t apply in the case of a teenager who was left paraplegic after falling 30 feet from a chair lift at Crested Butte, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled, opening a potentially expensive new avenue for trial lawyers to sue ski resorts.
While ski areas can still protect themselves against lawsuits over ordinary negligence, the court ruled, waivers don’t extend to claims the resort violated state laws regulating chair lifts and trams.
The decision was supported by the Colorado Trial Lawyers Association but drew a dissent from two justices who said it was contrary to legislative policy. Colorado legislators stepped in some 20 years ago to reverse another Colorado Supreme Court decision that declared parental waivers on behalf of their children to be illegal, saying it endangered access to youth sports.
Annalea Miller was skiing with her father in March 2022 when she failed to get on a chair lift properly and her father, Michael, grabbed her as the lift ascended into the air. Miller and other witnesses say they yelled for the lift to stop and Miller claims there was no lift attendant on the scene. He held on to Annie until the chair was 30 feet in the air, when she fell on hard snow and broke her spine.
A trial court dismissed their lawsuit, citing a Vail Resorts waiver Miller signed on behalf of his daughter releasing the company from claims based on “misloading, entanglements, or falls from ski lifts.”
Miller appealed, and the Colorado Supreme Court reversed in a May 20 decision by Justice Richard Gabriel. The opinion upheld the enforceability of ski waivers generally. But the majority drew a distinction between common-law negligence based upon a standard of reasonable care, which can be waived, and negligence per se, or claims that a defendant violated a statutory duty, which cannot.
In this case, the court cited the Passenger Tramway Safety Act, which incorporates industry standards including requirements that lift operators observe passengers and halt the lift when necessary. The trial court equated those standards with the reasonable care required under ordinary negligence, but the Supreme Court disagreed, saying “settled precedent from this court has established that a party cannot discharge its obligation to perform a statutory duty by way of an exculpatory agreement.”
Crested Butte argued a law allowing parents to sign waivers for their children controlled the claims here because it was enacted after the others. That law was passed to overrule a 2002 Colorado Supreme Court decision striking down parental waivers, the court said, not to eliminate all negligence claims by minors.
Justices Monica Marquez and Melissa Hart dissented, saying the release should have barred recovery because there was no practical difference between negligence based on the breach of a statutory or common-law duty. The standards the majority cited don’t require attendants to take any specific action, only to exercise reasonable care, the dissenters said.
“It may be true that, in response to an unusual occurrence, the only `appropriate’ actions would be to slow or stop the lift,” Justice Marquez wrote. “But it is not necessarily true that a lift attendant violates the rule by failing to stop or slow the lift.”
Crested Butte was represented by Bryan Cave and was supported by Colorado Ski Country USA and organizations representing youth camps and river outfitters. The plaintiffs were represented by Leventhal Puga Braley.