Any lawyer who deals with real estate needs to know about a Connecticut Supreme Court decision a year ago that may have expanded the potential for landlord and other property owner liability. It is a “sleeper,” probably overlooked by many because it comes cloaked in the guise of a dog bite case.
In Giacalone v. Housing Authority of the Town of Wallingford (2012), a tenant of the housing authority owned a dog that bit another tenant, Patricia Giacalone. Giacalone’s claim should have been simple enough to make, at least as to the dog’s owner, because Connecticut has a strict liability statute, Connecticut General Statutes Sec. 22-357, making an “owner or keeper” of dog generally liable for any injury to a person or damage to property. But here, Giacalone sued her landlord, the housing authority, in common-law negligence under Sec. 8-67 as “any person injured in person or property within boundaries of property owned or controlled by an authority.”
