A business invites you in to make money from your visit. In exchange, the law says it owes you a reasonably safe place to be. When it does not, and you are hurt, that is a premises case.
Premises liability covers injuries caused by a dangerous condition on someone's property: a wet floor with no warning, a broken stair, poor lighting, a fall hazard left in a walkway. In Texas, how much the owner owed you depends on why you were there. A customer or other invited guest, an invitee, is owed the most: the owner must use reasonable care to make the property safe or to warn of hazards it knew about or should have found through reasonable inspection.
The fight in these cases is usually notice. The defense argues the owner did not know about the hazard and had no reasonable chance to fix it. Proving otherwise takes evidence gathered before it disappears: incident reports, inspection and cleaning logs, maintenance records, and surveillance video, which many businesses overwrite within days.
Negligent security
A distinct and serious branch of premises law is negligent security. When a property owner should foresee the risk of crime, because of prior incidents or the surrounding area, and fails to take reasonable measures like lighting, locks, or guards, the owner can share responsibility for an assault or injury that follows. These cases turn on what the owner knew about the danger and what a reasonable owner would have done about it.
From The Night Docket
On duty, notice, and foreseeability:
The Fifth Circuit: Canales v. Walmart Texas →
A shopper slipped on water on the way to the restroom in a store, sued, and lost on summary judgment because she could not show how long the water had been on the floor. The Fifth Circuit affirmed: seventy-five minutes of security video that showed no change to the floor proved nothing about when the water arrived, employees walking past proved nothing without duration, another shopper slipping eight minutes earlier was too short a time, and dirty footprints are not evidence of time at all. Why it matters: in Texas a store answers for a spill only if it knew or should have known, should have known is a clock, the shopper has to start it, and the store holds the recordings and the logs that could.
One Word: Invitee →
The shopper, the hotel guest, the patient, the fan: anyone a business asks in is an invitee, and Texas owes that person its widest premises promise, to make the place safe or warn of what it knew or should have found. The four things an invitee has to prove, and why the fight is almost always over what the owner knew.
The Body: The Quiet Gas →
Carbon monoxide has no color and no smell, and it takes oxygen’s seat in the blood and holds it about two hundred times harder. Why the symptoms look like the flu, why the fingertip monitor reads normal, the injury that shows up weeks later, what the storms taught Texas about generators, and what the law asks.
Dispatch: Smoke →
Smoke inhalation looks minor and is often the most dangerous injury in a fire: two poisons that read normal on the monitor and an airway that swells over the first day. What a hotel owes a paying guest, and why the case turns on when they knew.
Odorant →
Natural gas has no smell; the warning is added by law. When a leak nobody smelled becomes an explosion, and who owns the pipe past the meter.
Sovereign →
Hurt at a tribal casino: what tribal immunity covers, where it stops, and who can still be sued.
The Stand →
Falls from deer stands, and the statute that sets what a landowner owes a hunter.
Duty →
The obligation a property owner takes on toward the people it invites in.
Notice →
What the owner knew, or should have known, about the hazard.
Foreseeable →
When harm was predictable enough that the law expects it to be prevented.