## Facts

- A landlord leased part of a building to grocery-store operators for use as a grocery in Louisa, Kentucky.
- The leased premises were destroyed by fire on May 8, 1983.
- The landlord alleged the tenants’ employees negligently accumulated flammable trash (including stacked materials up to the eaves) in violation of Kentucky fire-safety regulations.
- An arson investigator opined that someone intentionally set fire to paper boxes in or near dumpsters adjacent to the building.
- Other evidence indicated dumpsters were overflowing with trash that had accumulated for days and that fire-safety violations could reasonably be found to have been a substantial factor in the fire’s spread and the building’s destruction.
- The lease provided that if the premises were destroyed by fire or act of God (or severely damaged), the lessee could surrender the lease “without further obligation,” and the lease would be cancelled.

## Issues

1. Whether a lease clause allowing the lessee to surrender and cancel the lease if the premises are destroyed by fire exculpates the lessee from tort liability for negligently causing or contributing to the fire loss.
2. Whether an unknown arsonist’s intentional act was, as a matter of law, a superseding cause that broke proximate causation between the lessee’s alleged negligence and the landlord’s fire loss.

## Decision

- The Supreme Court of Kentucky reversed summary judgment for the tenants and remanded.
- The lease provision was a termination-of-lease clause addressing contractual obligations after destruction, not an explicit waiver of tort liability for negligence.
- The intentional act of an arsonist was not automatically a superseding cause; whether the tenants’ alleged negligence was a substantial factor and whether the criminal act was superseding were jury questions on this record.

## Legal Principles

- A lease provision permitting cancellation upon destruction by fire does not bar a landlord’s negligence claim absent clear, explicit language or an insurance-based risk allocation showing intent to immunize the tenant from tort liability.
- Under modern proximate-cause principles consistent with the Restatement (Second) of Torts, an intervening intentional or criminal act is not per se a superseding cause; liability may remain if the negligence created or increased a foreseeable risk of the type of harm that occurred.
- Summary judgment is improper where evidence would allow reasonable jurors to find that code-violating accumulation of combustible refuse was a substantial factor in the spread of a fire, even if ignition may have been intentional.

## Conclusion

The court held that the lease did not release the tenants from negligence liability for fire damage and that arson did not, as a matter of law, sever causation; both liability and superseding-cause questions were for the jury on the evidence presented.


Britton v. Wooten, 817 S.W.2d 443 (Ky. 1991)