## Facts

- Eileen R. Meyer drove her father’s automobile, which was owned, registered, and insured in Indiana, while traveling in Wisconsin.
- Passengers Louisa Meyer (Eileen’s mother) and LaVera Heath (Eileen’s sister) were Indiana residents.
- The Meyer vehicle collided in Wisconsin with an automobile driven by John E. Zellmer, a Wisconsin resident.
- Louisa Meyer and LaVera Heath sued Zellmer and his insurer in Wisconsin for negligence.
- Zellmer impleaded Eileen Meyer and her father, seeking contribution if Eileen was found causally negligent.
- Indiana law limited a host-driver’s liability to guests absent “wanton or wilful” misconduct; Wisconsin allowed guest recovery based on ordinary negligence.

## Issues

1. Whether Wisconsin should apply Indiana’s host–guest rule or Wisconsin’s ordinary-negligence standard to determine the host-driver’s liability and contribution rights arising from a Wisconsin automobile accident involving an Indiana-based vehicle and Indiana resident guests.

## Decision

- The Wisconsin Supreme Court affirmed the order denying summary judgment to the impleaded defendants (Eileen Meyer and her father).
- The court held Wisconsin law, not Indiana’s host–guest statute, governed the host-driver’s potential liability to the guest passengers and the related contribution claim.
- The case was permitted to proceed under Wisconsin’s ordinary-negligence standard.

## Legal Principles

- In multistate tort cases, Wisconsin applies a “most significant relationship” methodology rather than a mechanical place-of-injury rule.
- Choice-of-law analysis considers all relevant contacts and the competing governmental policies implicated by applying each jurisdiction’s rule; no single contact (such as where the host–guest relationship arose) is automatically controlling.
- Wisconsin’s interests in regulating conduct on its highways and providing remedies for injuries occurring there may justify applying Wisconsin tort standards, even when another state’s law would restrict recovery through loss-allocation rules like a guest statute.

## Conclusion

The court applied Wisconsin’s interest-based, most-significant-relationship analysis to a Wisconsin collision involving out-of-state guests and an Indiana-based vehicle and concluded Wisconsin’s ordinary-negligence law controlled, so Indiana’s guest statute did not bar the host-driver’s potential liability or Zellmer’s contribution claim.


Heath v. Zellmer, 151 N.W.2d 664 (Wis. 1967)