In Season 8, Episode 5 of Game of Thrones, Arya Stark finds herself trapped in King’s Landing during Daenerys’s attack, and as Arya flees the destruction, she encounters a terrified group of civilians. Arya persuades a mother and her daughter to go with her, insisting that they will die otherwise. Unfortunately, shortly after leaving the shelter, the mother and daughter were killed.
Assuming that the mother and daughter have surviving relatives who could sue Arya, is Arya liable for the tort of wrongful death?
Other than those in law enforcement or who are emergency responders, we regular citizens have no legal duty to help anyone in distress, as callous as that may sound. And once upon a time, it used to be that if a person attempted a rescue, the rescuer could have faced civil liability if the rescue failed and the rescuee wound up injured or otherwise worse off. Obviously, this risk of liability did not inspire a great deal of heroism.
To address this problem, all fifty states now have some kind of “Good Samaritan Law” that protects rescuers from civil liability. In California, for example, the Good Samaritan law is Health and Safety Code section 1799.102(b): “[N]o person who . . . renders emergency . . . assistance at the scene of an emergency shall be liable for civil damages resulting from any act or omission other than an act or omission constituting gross negligence.” This would sound pretty good to Arya, given that a dragon attack (!!!) qualifies as an emergency and her evacuation attempt would qualify as nonmedical emergency assistance.
Unfortunately, Arya may have a problem. The California Good Samaritan statute has an exception for a rescue attempt that is so foolhardy and reckless that it amounts to “gross negligence,” which is usually defined as a “want of even scant care or an extreme departure from the ordinary standard of conduct.” City of Santa Barbara v. Superior Court, 41 Cal. 4th 747, 754 (2007) (quotes omitted). To convince a court that Arya should not receive the benefit of the Good Samaritan law, the plaintiffs might argue that luring the mother and daughter from their hiding place and out into the open was grossly negligent.
And they might have a point. If any of the other people that were hiding with the mother and daughter survived, those survivors could testify that they vigorously disagreed with Arya’s advice to run. They obviously believed that leaving their shelter seemed to them like “an extreme departure from the ordinary standard of conduct.”
However, Arya could argue that given how thoroughly doomed King’s Landing was in the face of a dragon attack, remaining in their shelter offered less hope than the admittedly very slim chance of escape. Arya could argue that her effort, even if it didn’t succeed, is exactly the kind of heroism that Good Samaritan laws protect. Ultimately, A Girl is likely a Good Samaritan—and is justified in freely riding off on a random white horse while facing no tort liability.