## Facts

- Arthur Kuehner, a New York domiciliary, drove from Buffalo, New York, to Fort Erie, Ontario, and picked up Amie Neumeier, an Ontario domiciliary.
- The men traveled in Ontario and intended to return to Neumeier’s home in Fort Erie.
- In Sherkston, Ontario, the car collided with a train at a railroad crossing; both Kuehner and Neumeier died.
- Ontario law included a motor-vehicle guest statute limiting a host driver’s liability to guest passengers to cases of gross negligence.
- Neumeier’s widow, an Ontario domiciliary acting as administratrix, brought a wrongful death action in New York against Kuehner’s estate and the Canadian railway.
- Defendants asserted the Ontario guest statute as an affirmative defense; the trial court applied Ontario law, the Appellate Division refused to apply the statute, and review was taken by the New York Court of Appeals.

## Issues

1. In a New York wrongful death action arising from an Ontario accident involving a New York host driver and an Ontario guest passenger, whether Ontario or New York law governs host–guest liability.
2. Whether the Ontario guest statute may be asserted as a defense in New York to limit the passenger’s estate to recovery only upon proof of gross negligence.
3. What structured choice-of-law rules should govern guest-statute conflicts in multi-jurisdiction automobile accidents.

## Decision

- The New York Court of Appeals reversed the Appellate Division and reinstated the result applying Ontario law.
- The court held that Ontario’s guest statute governed the host–guest claim and could be asserted as a defense.
- The court announced structured rules (commonly associated with this case) to guide choice-of-law analysis in guest-statute and similar loss-allocation conflicts.

## Legal Principles

- For loss-allocation conflicts in host–guest automobile cases, the court applied structured choice-of-law rules tied to party domiciles and the place of the accident.
- When driver and passenger share a common domicile, the law of that domicile generally governs loss allocation, even if the accident occurs elsewhere.
- When driver and passenger have different domiciles, and the place-of-accident law favors the same party as the law of one party’s domicile, the law of the place of the accident generally applies.
- In other split-domicile situations, the law of the place of the accident ordinarily governs unless applying another jurisdiction’s law would better serve the relevant substantive purposes without impairing uniform results and predictability in multi-jurisdiction cases.
- A jurisdiction has a substantial interest in applying its loss-allocation rule to accidents within its territory and to claims by its domiciliaries, particularly where the rule reflects the jurisdiction’s chosen standard of host-driver responsibility to guest passengers.

## Conclusion

The court applied Ontario’s guest statute to an Ontario passenger killed in Ontario, rejecting the use of New York’s more plaintiff-favorable law, and established structured domicile-and-locus-based rules to produce more consistent results in multi-jurisdiction tort choice-of-law disputes.


Neumeier v. Kuehner, 31 N.Y.2d 121 (N.Y. 1972)