TORTS - WRONGFUL EXCLUSION FROM AN ELEVATOR - DAMAGES FOR MENTAL PAIN AND HUMILIATION

Authors

Michigan Law Review, University of Michigan Law School

Abstract

Plaintiff's wife, a Caucasian, having business with a tenant on the fifteenth floor, entered defendant's elevator containing other whites. She and a Negro woman were directed by the operator to take an elevator in the rear of the store used for freight and Negro passengers; and being ignorant of this latter fact, she used this elevator. Asserting that she was wrongfully excluded from the elevator for white people and thereby was considered to be a negro by both whites and colored people, she claimed to have suffered mental anguish, humiliation, and physical suffering. Held, the defendant, while not a common carrier in the full sense, owed a similar degree of care in respect to safety and comfort to those who, on implied invitation, used the elevator service, and that the plaintiff could recover for the mental pain and humiliation suffered by his wife as the result of the breach of duty owed an invitee. O'Connor v. Dallas Cotton Exchange, (Tex. Civ. App. 1941) 153 S. W. (2d) 266.

Recommended Citation

Michigan Law Review, TORTS - WRONGFUL EXCLUSION FROM AN ELEVATOR - DAMAGES FOR MENTAL PAIN AND HUMILIATION, 40 Mich. L. Rev. 1277 (1942).
Available at: https://repository.law.umich.edu/mlr/vol40/iss8/24