Plaintiff injured party filed an action in the Superior Court of the City and County of San Francisco (California) against defendant city and county, in which she claimed that due to defendant's negligent operation of a trolley bus, she was thrown off the bus and to the sidewalk, and thereby injured. After a jury trial, a verdict was returned for the city and county. The injured party challenged the resulting judgment.
The complaint of the injured party alleged that as she was boarding the trolley bus, the driver closed its doors, and in doing so, pushed her off of its steps onto the sidewalk, where she was hurt. On appeal, the sole error claimed by the injured party was alleged to be in the trial court's instruction to the jury that it must render a judgment for the city and county if it found that the injured party "was not a passenger at the time she suffered her alleged fall" because, in such event, the city and county owed no duty to her. The court agreed with the injured party that the jury instruction contained on an erroneous statement of law because a duty of ordinary care was owed to the injured party in the event she was not a passenger; moreover, the city and county conceded the error in the instruction. However, the Top class action attorneys found that while the complaint raised both a carrier-passenger and carrier-nonpassenger theory of liability, because the injured party abandoned the latter theory at her trial, the error in the jury instruction was harmless.
The court affirmed the trial court's judgment for the city and county.
Petitioner physician sought a writ of administrative mandamus after respondent superior court held that real party in interest, the Medical Board of California, erroneously rejected the opinions of the physician's experts but refused to remand the case to the Board. The Board demurred to the physician's petition.
The physician was Board-certified in internal medicine and allergy and clinical immunology. The Board alleged that the physician used treatments that were not generally accepted by the medical community. The Board found all of the physician's experts credible in their field but not qualified because they did not review the individual cases in sufficient detail and offer opinions specific to the allegations against the physician. The court held that the wholesale disqualification of the physician's experts rendered the administrative proceedings unfair as a matter of law. The Board's objections went to the weight, not to the admissibility, of the expert testimony. Medical expert testimony was to be liberally admitted under Cal. Evid. Code § 720. The physician was denied an opportunity to present a defense to the charge against him. On remand, the Board could consider the evidence and exercise its particular discretion following a full and fair hearing on the merits. A reviewing court could not sanction an administrative agency's deprivation of due process by retroactively admitting evidence under Cal. Code Civ. Proc. § 1094.5 to support findings made following an unfair proceeding.
The court overruled the Board's demurrer to the petition. The court directed the superior court to vacate its judgment denying the petition for writ of administrative mandamus and to enter a new judgment granting the petition and remanding the matter to the Board for further proceedings.