Los
Angeles County Superior Court BC469935 J. Stephen Czuleger
and Holly E. Kendig judge
Law
Offices of Martin N. Buchanan, Martin N. Buchanan; Girardi
& Keese and David R. Lira for Plaintiffs and Appellants.
Shook,
Hardy & Bacon, Frank C. Rothrock, Douglas W. Robinson,
Janet L. Hickson and Kevin Underhill for Defendant and
Respondent.
Justice Chin authored the opinion of the Court, in which
Chief Justice Cantil-Sakauye and Justices Corrigan, Liu,
Cuéllar, Kruger, and Groban concurred.
OPINION
CHIN,
J.
In this
tort action arising out of a fatal tour bus accident in
Arizona, the parties initially included plaintiffs from China
and defendants from both Indiana and California. Asked to
decide which jurisdiction's law applied to the case, the
trial court conducted the governmental interest test (see
Reich v. Purcell (1967) 67 Cal.2d 551
(Reich)) and concluded that Indiana law governed.
Before trial, however, the plaintiffs accepted a settlement
offer from the Indiana manufacturer of the tour bus and
dismissed that defendant from the case. We granted review to
determine if the trial court should have reconsidered the
previous choice of law ruling after that Indiana defendant
was no longer a party.
For
reasons that follow, we conclude that the trial court was
not required to reconsider the prior choice of law
ruling based on the party's settlement. Because the trial
court did not err by declining to reconsider the ruling, we
reverse the Court of Appeal's judgment.
Factual
and Procedural Background
The
underlying action concerns a rollover bus accident on October
17, 2010 in Meadview, Arizona. The bus passengers were ten
Chinese tourists and their tour guide who were traveling from
Las Vegas, Nevada for a day trip to the Grand Canyon in
Arizona. The driver of the bus, Zhi Lu, a California
resident, worked for TBE International, Inc. (TBE), a
California tour company that owned and operated the 16-seat
tour bus. Lu drove the bus from Los Angeles, California and
picked up the Chinese tourists at their Las Vegas hotel.
While
en route to the Grand Canyon, Lu drove the bus around a curve
at a high rate of speed and lost control. The bus rolled over
twice. The driver and tour guide were in the front seats,
which were equipped with three-point seatbelts (lap and
shoulder restraints). Neither suffered any serious injury in
the accident. None of the passenger seats, however, were
equipped with seatbelts of any kind. Two passengers were
killed. One female passenger was impaled in the door
mechanism; a male passenger was ejected from the bus and
fatally fractured his skull. Six other passengers were
ejected from the bus and suffered injuries. The remaining two
passengers, who were not ejected, sustained injuries as well.
In
September 2011, the eight passengers and survivors of the two
passengers who were killed (plaintiffs) filed an action in
Los Angeles County Superior Court against two
California-based defendants, the tour bus company TBE, and
the distributor who sold the tour bus to TBE, Los Angeles
Truck Centers, LLC dba Buswest (Buswest), a California
corporation with multiple locations nationwide. Plaintiffs
also sued the bus manufacturer, Forest River, Inc. (Forest
River), an Indiana corporation that designed, manufactured,
and modified the tour bus, and Starcraft, a division of
Forest River. Because the parties have referred to the buses
as “Starcraft buses, ” we refer to the
manufacturer of the buses as Starcraft. Unless otherwise
noted, references to Starcraft necessarily include Forest
River.
In
their operative second amended complaint, plaintiffs alleged
causes of action for wrongful death, negligence, strict
products liability, loss of consortium, and negligent
infliction of emotional distress. That the driver, Lu, was at
fault for the accident was not in dispute. The main theories
of plaintiffs' action were that Starcraft negligently
designed and manufactured the bus and that Buswest chose to
order the bus without seatbelts, which would have prevented
the deaths and, at the very least, would have minimized the
injuries of the passengers in the rollover crash.
In
December 2012, TBE and Lu settled with plaintiffs for $5
million, in exchange for a full release of all claims against
them. One year later, after the governing two-year statute of
limitations had already run (Code Civ. Proc., § 335.1),
defendants Starcraft and Buswest (collectively, defendants)
filed a “Joint Notice of Motion and Motion Regarding
Choice of Law on Behalf of Defendants” to determine the
choice of law. In that motion, defendants alleged that
plaintiffs' claims “potentially implicate”
four different jurisdictions, i.e., Indiana, Arizona, China,
and California. Defendants maintained that under the
governmental interest test to determine the choice of law
(see Reich, supra, 67 Cal.2d 551), Indiana
law applied. After considering the parties' extensive
briefing, the trial judge (Judge Kendig)[1] granted
defendants' motion and concluded that Indiana law
governed the case. Plaintiffs filed a writ of mandate
challenging the trial court's ruling on the choice of
law, which the Court of Appeal denied based on
plaintiffs' failure to show entitlement to extraordinary
relief.
In
August 2014, the same month the trial was originally set to
begin, plaintiffs settled with Starcraft for $3.25 million,
and, over Buswest's opposition, Judge Kendig granted
Starcraft's motion for good faith settlement (Code Civ.
Proc., § 877.6). After the settlement left
California-based Buswest as the sole defendant, Buswest filed
a motion for summary judgment under Indiana law, which the
trial court denied. The trial court also denied
plaintiffs' request ...