Every restaurant owner in New England knows the January morning routine: salt the entrance, scrape the ramp, put out the mat, do it again at noon. What changed in 2010 is that the routine stopped being good hospitality and became a legal obligation with teeth.
The case that did it involved a fall in a shopping mall parking lot, and it rewrote a rule Massachusetts had lived with for over a century.
The Rule That Was Abolished
For generations, Massachusetts distinguished between “natural” and “unnatural” accumulations of snow and ice. If snow fell and froze where it landed, a property owner generally owed nothing; the accumulation was natural, and the law treated it as a hazard of living in New England.
Liability attached only to unnatural accumulations, meaning ice created by something the owner did: a downspout discharging across a walkway, a plow pile that melted and refroze across an entrance…