Davenport v. Cotton Hope Plantation Horizontal Property Regime
South Carolina Supreme Court
508 S.E.2d 565 (1998)
After notifying Cotton Hope (defendant) that the lighting on a stairway near his rented condominium was not working, Davenport (plaintiff) continued using that darkened stairway and was injured in a fall, then sued for negligence; the trial court directed a verdict against him based on assumption of risk and separately found he was more than 50 percent negligent even under comparative principles, while the court of appeals reversed, holding assumption of risk had been subsumed into the state's comparative-negligence system and that relative fault was a jury question.
Whether assumption of risk is an absolute bar to a plaintiff's recovery if the plaintiff's degree of fault in assuming the risk is less than the defendant's negligence.