The New York Court of Appeals recently issued its decision in Mann v. Mezuyon, LLC, resolving a longstanding split among the Appellate Division departments over whether 12 NYCRR § 23-4.2(k) is sufficiently specific to serve as a predicate for liability under Labor Law § 241(6). Court of Appeals Labor Law decisions are infrequent, and each marks an important moment in the development of New York construction-accident jurisprudence. The significance of Mann, however, lies not merely in the rarity of the Court of Appeals review, but in the clarity of the analytical framework the Court announced.

The case traveled a long procedural path to Albany. The Supreme Court, New York County, dismissed the plaintiff's § 241(6) claim, holding that First Department precedent foreclosed reliance on Industrial Code § 23-4.2(k) as insufficiently specific to support statutory liability. The Appellate Division, First Department, affirmed, declining the plaintiff's invitation to adopt the Second Department's contrary view. Plaintiff then sought and obtained leave to appeal directly to the Court of Appeals.

The departmental split was clear and longstanding. The Second Department had concluded that § 23-4.2(k) was sufficiently specific to support a § 241(6) claim. The First, Third, and Fourth Departments held otherwise, creating materially different litigation landscapes depending solely on venue. The Court of Appeals affirmed, holding that § 23-4.2(k) is not sufficiently specific to serve as a § 241(6) predicate, and in doing so brought statewide uniformity to a question that had divided the courts for years.

That resolution alone would make Mann significant. The more consequential aspect of the decision, however, is the analytical framework the Court articulated in reaching that result.

Since Ross v. Curtis-Palmer Hydro-Elec. Co. established that a viable § 241(6) claim must be grounded in a sufficiently specific Industrial Code provision rather than a generalized safety directive, litigants and courts have wrestled with where precisely that line falls.

Mann sharpens the analysis considerably.

The Court held that to qualify as a viable § 241(6) predicate, an Industrial Code provision must do two things: identify a specific hazard and prescribe a specific remedial measure.

Identifying a workplace danger without also specifying the concrete means by which that danger must be addressed is not enough.

That two-part framework has implications well beyond excavation cases. Industrial Code provisions that describe hazards in broad terms but stop short of mandating objective compliance measures are now squarely subject to renewed scrutiny. Practitioners on both sides of the bar should expect closer examination of predicates whose specificity has previously been assumed or inconsistently analyzed.

Mann does more than settle a narrow dispute over one excavation regulation. It provides a sharper analytical lens for the specificity analysis that has governed § 241(6) litigation for three decades. It is likely to feature prominently in Labor Law motion practice going forward, and how rigorously the lower courts apply its framework may well define the next chapter of § 241(6) jurisprudence in New York.

We will provide further updates here as the case law on this issue develops. Stay tuned.