Recent Nuisance Cases in OK, CA

The Oklahoma Supreme Court rejected a lawsuit against municipal officials claiming that their racially disparate treatment of residents, beginning at the time of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, constituted a public nuisance:

Randle v. City of Tulsa, 2024 OK 40, at ¶¶ 0-4,19-20,  ___P.3d___, ___ (2024) (holding that defendants’ “unlawful acts and omissions that began with the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 and continue to this day” allegedly causing Plaintiffs to “ ‘continue to face racially disparate treatment and City-created barriers to basic human needs’ ” do not constitute a legally actionable public nuisance; “Plaintiffs’ claim does not present a conflict resolvable by way of abatement. . . . The continuing blight . . . born out of the Massacre implicates generational-societal inequities that can only be resolved by policymakers—not the courts. . . . [E]xpanding public nuisance liability to include lingering social inequities from historical tragedies . . . runs the risk of creating a new ‘unlimited and unprincipled’ form of liability wherein both State and non-State actors could be held liable for their predecessors’ wrongdoing, in which current actors played no part.”) (citation omitted).

Meanwhile, a California appellate court held a liquor store liable under a state drug-house nuisance statute when the defendant tolerated the sale of illegal drugs on its premises:

People v. Freetown Holdings Co., 100 Cal. App. 5th 1195, 1208, 320 Cal. Rptr. 3d 20, 31, ___P.3d___, ___ (2024) (“ ‘A possessor of land upon which a third person carries on an activity that causes a nuisance is subject to liability for the nuisance if it is otherwise actionable, and [¶] (a) the possessor knows or has reason to know that the activity is being carried on and that it is causing or will involve an unreasonable risk of causing the nuisance, and [¶] (b) he consents to the activity or fails to exercise reasonable care to prevent the nuisance.’ ”; holding liquor store liable under state statute declaring places used for sales of illegal drugs to be public nuisances (quoting Restatement (Second) of Torts § 838 (1979)) (emphasis and brackets added by court)).