What The Puck

The New Jersey Supreme Court ruled 4-3 that a woman could not bring suit against two minor league ice hockey teams, the Trenton Titans, the Johnstown Chiefs, the league and the Mercer County Improvement Authority, which owns the Sovereign Bank arena where the incident occurred.

Sciarrotta was seated about six rows from the ice at the Sovereign Bank Arena and above the a Plexiglas protective barrier that surrounded the rink. She was injured when a puck slapped by an unidentified player struck a goalpost and caromed above the Plexiglas during a pre-game warm-up when the Titans and Johnstown Chiefs had as many as 50 pucks on the ice.

Sciarrotta sued the Titans, the Chiefs, the league and the Mercer County Improvement Authority, which owns the arena. An appeals court overruled a Mercer Superior Court decision and held that she had a right to sue. But the teams, league and county appealed to the Supreme Court.

The justices reviewed the so-called "limited duty rule,'' which applies to sports venues and addresses the peril of objects leaving the field of play. They found a venue operator has satisfied its duty to safeguard spectators if it provides protected seating for the most dangerous sections of the stands.

At the heart of the matter is what duty is owed to those who visit sports venues and could be affected by balls or other objects struck or thrown into the stands. Here, the justices correctly determined that the venue operator satisfied its duty by protecting those in the most dangerous sections.

This will likely prevent further suits of dubious merit from being filed against venues for similar incidents.

The actual case can be found Denise Sciarrotta, et al. v. Global Spectrum, et al., A-28-07, 4/10/2008. The summation of the case provides some interesting case history, as well as legislative history that is relevant. New Jersey enacted a law in 2006 to deal with a case of a baseball spectator struck and injured by a foul ball while at a concession stand.

The Court rejects Sciarrotta's argument that her situation should be exempt from the application of the limited duty rule because she was injured during warm-ups when multiple pucks are on the ice, rather than during a game when only one puck is on the ice. Although this Court geographically restricted the scope of the limited duty rule in Maisonave v. Newark Bears Prof'l Baseball Club, Inc., 185 N.J. 70 (2005), by limiting its application to injuries to spectators that occur in the stands, that restriction was rejected by the Legislature in the New Jersey Baseball Spectator Safety Act of 2006. In the same statute, the Legislature also defined a professional baseball game as including pre-game activities. Therefore, the Court sees no reason to restrict the scope of the limited duty rule solely to the temporal limits of the game itself.