Date: Mon, 8 May 2006 15:15:59 -0300

From: Marc Ramsay

Subject: Religious thin skulls

Does anyone know of a negligence case in which a plaintiff received compensation for wrongful confinement?

I'm currently working on the notion of religious thin skulls. I'm considering the question of whether one could accept the general idea of religious thin skulls, but still rule out compensation for victims in cases such as Friedman v New York. Friedman and her male companion were left stranded on a chair-lift over night because of the negligence of the lift operators. Friedman jumped from the lift because she believed that her religious commitments precluded her, as an unmarried woman, from being alone with a man after dark in a place where she could not be checked upon.

Following the idea that the thin skull rule comes into effect only where an initially foreseeable injury grows worse because it interacts with a plaintiff's special vulnerability, one might argue that Friedman should have been denied compensation. Unlike the plaintiffs in cases such as Williams and Bright (where a Jehovah's Witness plaintiff's losses from an auto-accident increase as a result of the refusal to accept a blood transfusion), the plaintiff in Friedman didn't suffer any physical harm prior to her religiously motivated choice to jump. The thin skull rule doesn't come into effect because there is no foreseeable injury.

However, if her confinement to the lift counts as a compensable injury, then the thin skull rule seems to come into effect.

Marc Ramsay
Acadia University

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