Pfau v. Trent Aluminum Co.

Steven Pfau (plaintiff), a Connecticut domiciliary, was injured in an Iowa car accident while a passenger in a vehicle driven by Bruce Trent (defendant), a New Jersey domiciliary, operating a vehicle owned by Trent Aluminum Co. (defendant), a New Jersey corporation; both were attending college in Iowa. Pfau sued in New Jersey for negligence, and the defendants invoked Iowa's guest statute (which barred ordinary-negligence suits by passengers against host drivers) as a defense, and separately argued that if Connecticut law applied instead of Iowa's, the court should also apply Connecticut's own choice-of-law rule (lex loci delicti), which would point back to Iowa law anyway.