The crucial distinction is invitee vs. licensee. The naming is a little counter-intuitive, but it's not such a hard concept: we have different thresholds of duties depending on our relationship with the entrants on our property.
Three categories of duties:
Children are another exception. See Note 8 on p. 200. There's a passage from R2T about how children are treated differently: factors to weigh.
Trial court thinks plaintiff is a licensee (therefore not entitled to recovery). Being Santa isn't a tangible benefit to the hospital, perhaps.
We need to get rid of these categories because we want to simplify things. We want, for example, attorneys to be able to advise their clients. It's better for everyone if we don't have these picky little details that flip-flop outcomes around. Better to focus on the conduct of the defendant than on the category of the plaintiff. The latter is confusing and arbitrary.
There are other reasons for making this shift. For example, these places have incentives to protect invitees anyhow-- no point in saying that the burden of care is relaxed for their licensees.
Of course this makes impositions on homeowners as well, though: social guests are owed the same duty of care. The dissent points out that this is socializing private property. Under this new rule, even trespassers get the same protection or burglars. So maybe this goes a bit far.
So CA recoils from this ruling, and passes a law protecting against this sort of excess (see note 5 on p. 207).
The court talks about a duty arising in some limited circumstances, and then goes to determine whether it arose and was met in this case. This is one of those opinions that's designed not so much to resolve the issue at hand as to delineate the circumstances in which we would hold a store liable.
Father sues on behalf of the child. This seems clearly unintentional (accident or negligence).
There would be immunity in NY: parent acting in a supervisory capacity. In WI, you could have immunity if you argued that the parent was providing care. So these are counter-intuitive results, if we preserve immunity.
Anyway, here the court proclaims the reasonable parent standard.
The concurring opinion likes the abrogation of immunity, but is worried about bringing in pure tort principles: parents need to be allowed to do some things that ordinary people would not. This shows how uncomfortable the area is for courts.
Perhaps the court is being gentle for a hidden reason. The facts don't tell us why the police refused assistence. It seems assumed that there was some valid professional judgment. But what if it was a clarical mistake, or a bad call on their part? Still no liability. The court doesn't differentiate between the nature of the police activities: they just say they're not going to impose liability.
Compare note 4, p. 237: DeLong. Very much like the recent Madison 911 call case. NY requires that there be direct communication and reliace by the caller in order to create a special relationship from which liability can be derived. This is an exception to the general immunity rule, but it's sort of a fine line: when has there been reliance? Well, at least this isn't a question of resource allocation-- it's pure mistake.
Of course, one concern here is like Belle Realty: if we open the door to one suit, will we get an avalance of suits from everyone who didn't get the services they wanted? There's fear on the court's part that the cases will come in and deplete the resources that the city is supposed to provide. The dissent doesn't buy it, of course: municpalities aren't going broke because of their other tort liabilities.
Riss had a big impact on a lot of cases after it. See Note 3 on p. 236 (Weiner).
Shouldn't we want tort law (as it does in the private sector) to justify the allocation of more resources in a given area? We let tort law declare custom invalid in other areas-- why not here? We can use tort judgments to push people in a certain diretion, but for some reason we back off of this with municipalities.