## Facts

- Fourteen-year-old Alan Fish was struck in the head by a line-drive foul ball while attending a Los Angeles Dodgers game at Dodger Stadium.
- He briefly lost consciousness and then exhibited abnormal speech and behavior.
- Stadium attendants brought him to the stadium first-aid station, where Dr. Glen E. Jones examined him after being told he had been hit in the head.
- After a short examination, Dr. Jones advised that Alan could return to his seat and resume normal activities.
- Alan appeared largely normal for the remainder of the game, but his condition worsened after leaving the stadium.
- His parents took him to Children’s Hospital about 40 minutes after leaving, where he received medical care.
- The next evening Alan suffered a convulsion, became terminal, and died a few days later.
- Autopsy attributed death to failure to contain a brain hemorrhage caused by the foul ball’s impact.
- The parents sued the Dodgers for (1) unsafe premises for spectators and (2) negligent emergency medical care, and sued Dr. Jones for malpractice; the Dodgers were also sued under respondeat superior for Dr. Jones’s conduct.
- The trial court granted a nonsuit on the unsafe-premises theory (not challenged on appeal), and the case proceeded to the jury only on malpractice and causation.
- Defendants argued Children’s Hospital physicians could have contained the hemorrhage through timely surgery and that any failure there, not Dr. Jones’s conduct, caused death.

## Issues

1. Whether the trial court erred in its causation instructions by failing to adequately present plaintiffs’ theory that Dr. Jones could be liable if his negligence was a substantial factor in death even if later hospital physicians were also negligent.
2. Whether the court was required to give plaintiffs’ proposed instructions addressing concurrent causation and rejecting later medical negligence as a superseding cause, rather than relying on a general substantial-factor instruction.

## Decision

- The Court of Appeal affirmed the judgment for defendants.
- The substantial-factor causation instruction was legally correct and adequate to permit the jury to find liability even if it believed later treating physicians were also negligent.
- A party is entitled to instructions covering its theory if supported by the pleadings and evidence, but not to any particular phrasing.
- Reading the instructions as a whole, the jury was not misdirected into believing it had to select a single exclusive cause or that later negligence automatically cut off earlier liability.
- The refusal to give plaintiffs’ requested causation instructions was not prejudicial error.

## Legal Principles

- Legal causation in negligence may be proven if the defendant’s conduct is a substantial factor in bringing about the harm; it need not be the sole cause.
- Multiple actors’ negligence may concurrently cause an injury; later medical negligence does not necessarily supersede an earlier actor’s liability when the earlier negligence remains a substantial factor.
- Instructional error is assessed by considering the instructions as a whole; a trial court need not give a requested instruction in a particular form if the given instructions fairly and correctly state the law and allow the jury to apply the party’s theory.
- Reversal for instructional error requires a showing of prejudicial misdirection, not merely that additional or differently worded instructions might have been given.

## Conclusion

The court upheld a defense verdict where the jury was instructed on substantial-factor causation, holding that the instructions sufficiently allowed for concurrent causation and did not require special language to address possible later negligence by treating physicians as a superseding cause.


Fish v. Los Angeles Dodgers Baseball Club, 56 Cal. App. 3d 620, 128 Cal. Rptr. 807 (Ct. App. 1976)