Host's Risks

In a decision that has left partygivers in California as shaken as a pitcher of martinis, the state supreme court has ruled that private hosts could be liable for auto accidents and other damages that resulted if they negligently served booze to obviously intoxicated guests.

The case involved one James Coulter, an apprentice machine technician whose right side was paralyzed in a 1976 auto accident on the way home from a party in Foster City, Calif. Coulter, now 28, claims that the car slammed into a bridge abutment because its driver, a young woman, had consumed "extremely large quantities" of beer at the party. Although the court did not pass on the merits of Coulter's $1 million damage suit against the host, it overturned a lower court's ruling that the state's civil liability law applied only to bars, restaurants and liquor stores, not partygivers. Said the majority: No one can serve booze "under conditions involving a reasonably foreseeable risk of harm to others." California thus joins a small but growing group of states, including New York, Iowa and Oregon, where a too generous host can be held liable for his tipsy guests' excesses.

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