Gov. Code, § 840.4 · Article 3. Liability of Public Employees
Gov. Code, § 840.4
Text — As published in the Legislative Counsel's database, tables dated October 18, 2026 (pubinfo_2025.zip)
(a) A public employee had actual notice of a dangerous condition within the meaning of subdivision (b) of Section 840.2 if he had actual personal knowledge of the existence of the condition and knew or should have known of its dangerous character.
(b) A public employee had constructive notice of a dangerous condition within the meaning of subdivision (b) of Section 840.2 only if the plaintiff establishes (1) that the public employee had the authority and it was his responsibility as a public employee to inspect the property of the public entity or to see that inspections were made to determine whether dangerous conditions existed in the public property, (2) that the funds and other means for making such inspections or for seeing that such inspections were made were immediately available to the public employee, and (3) that the dangerous condition had existed for such a period of time and was of such an obvious nature that the public employee, in the exercise of his authority and responsibility with due care, should have discovered the condition and its dangerous character.
Notes and commentary — not statutory text
History
Added by Stats. 1963, Ch. 1681.
Source of truth
- Edition
- As published in the Legislative Counsel's database, tables dated October 18, 2026 (pubinfo_2025.zip)
- Official file
- https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection.xhtml?lawCode=GOV§ionNum=840.4.
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- sha256 80067c73a1f2976d9abeca1511490160b119e8104346984129a16797fdd24bb4
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- compose_ca.py 2026-10-22: the Legislative Counsel's CAML content files read by a tokenizer (caml_readers.reader_a); an independent xml.etree reading (caml_readers.reader_b) agrees on every section
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