Draft:Minor v. Sharon
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Minor v. Sharon was an 1873 Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts case which held that a landlord could be sued for negligently renting out an apartment which exposed his tenants to smallpox.
The plaintiffs were Canadian immigrant Ezra Minor and some of his eight children[1], who rented a tenement in Holyoke, Massachusetts. After members of the family contracted smallpox, they sued the landlord, Joseph H. Sharon. In his defense, Sharon argued that a landlord had no obligation to disclose or remedy smallpox contagion, and that Minor's failure to vaccinate his children constituted Contributory negligence
The opinion in the case was delivered by Associate Justice Marcus Morton, who stated that "In this case the defendant knew that the tenement was so infected as to endanger the health and life of any person who might occupy it. It was a plain duty of humanity on his part to inform the plaintiff of this fact, or to refrain from leasing it until he had used proper means to disinfect it."[2]
The case was cited by future Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. in The Common Law.