Lift-ticket Liability Waivers

It's nice to see that an appeals court in Pennsylvania has given some skepticism to those liability waivers attached to ski resort lift tickets. The case in question started after an operator promised to stop a chair lift so a woman and her young nephew could get on safely. Instead, he tried to put the six-year-old on to the moving chair and then failed to stop the lift as the kid fell off along with his aunt who was trying to hang on to him. The woman sued over her injuries, but the trial court threw out her case because she signed a broad liability waiver she never read. The higher court found the waiver pretty dubious and sent the case back.

Being from Utah, I've known some lift operators and a few of them were notorious pot-heads. It's one thing to waive your right to sue if you schuss drunkly into a tree. But skiers ought to be able to hold a resort responsible for injuries that were caused by the ski bums running the chair lift.

Comments

[Jim Collins]

While the operator may have been wrong in how the lift was operated, she has no one to blame but herself for not reading the waiver before signing it.

[Aaron]

The court didn't take the position that the failure to read the release would somehow excuse her from its terms: "[E]ven though Lori admittedly did not read the release-from-liability form, there is an assertion that an agreement was reached between Lori and the lift operator which superseded any that might have been created under the release from liability form".