Columbus, OH – The Ohio Supreme Court ruled last week that a woman injured in a ski collision on the slopes of Boston Mills and her husband cannot sue the family of a teen snowboarder who collided with her.

Angel Horvath and her husband, Eugene, sued the family of 14-year-old snowboarder David Ish after he collided with her in March 2007 at the resort in Peninsula, Ohio, fracturing her leg. A judge in Ohio’s Common Pleas Court of Summit County first rejected the lawsuit, indicating that Ish was not acting recklessly and that the collision was a risk inherent to the sport of skiing. After the 9th Ohio District Court of Appeals found in 2011 that the lower court did not consider the potential recklessness of the teen before the collision, the case wound up in the Ohio Supreme Court, which affirmed the decision from the Court of Common Pleas and ruled that the Ohio skier safety act precludes one skier from suing another over a collision on the slopes.

“Like most ski states, Ohio has a ski statute (Ohio Rev. Code Ann. §4169.01 et seq.) which mandates that all skiers expressly assume the inherent risks of the sport and cannot recover for injuries sustained from those inherent risks,” notes David B. Cronheim, chief legal correspondent for First Tracks!! Online. “The court in this case found that the defendant’s actions were not reckless or intentional and that a collision between two skiers was an inherent risk of skiing. As an inherent risk, the plaintiff was not entitled to recovery. Such a decision is consistent with the law in the majority of other jurisdictions in the United States.”