Karl L. Pomer and Claire L. Pomer v. Dennis Schoolman and James King, Counterplaintiffs-Appellants v. Deere & Company, Counterdefendant-Appellee

POSNER, Circuit Judge.

A gruesome accident on an Illinois farm in 1983 has produced an appeal which brings before us the fellow-servant rule — a nineteenth-century tort doctrine long ago consigned, one might have thought, to the dustbin of history. The appellants, who were the plaintiffs in the district court, are Karl Pomer and his wife (the latter claiming loss of consortium). The defendants are Dennis Schoolman, an Illinois farmer who hired Pomer to drive a truck; James King, a fellow employee of Pomer’s, who drives a combine for Schoolman; and Deere & Company, the manufacturer both of the…