What is the duty of a landlord to ensure the safety of a tenant and members of his household?

The reasoning in Gaul v. King, supra, is applicable to this case and in my view the appellant had a duty to see that the premises were as safe as reasonable care and skill could make them. The tenant and members of his household were clearly within the class of persons intended to be protected by the statute and the lessor owed a duty to them to exercise reasonable care.

The defects in this case were obvious from both inside and outside the premises, which was not the situation in Gaul v. King. In determining whether the lessor was liable the trial Judge was required to look at the duty to repair imposed by the statute. The following passage is from The Law of Torts by Fleming, 4th ed. (1971), pp. 121-2: For some situations the appropriate standard of conduct is prescribed by the legislature instead of being left to the evaluative process of judge and jury. The complexity of modern life has spawned a profuse progeny of governmental regulations, demanding observance of fixed and specific precautions for the safe conduct of industrial operations, building construction, road traffic and so forth. Rarely do they address themselves to their possible effect on civil liability, being content with prescribing a criminal sanction, usually a fine, for any disobedience whether or not it causes injury to anyone. Yet the absence of any expressed intention to provide a remedy in damages has not prevented the courts from treating non-compliance with the statutory rule as having a decided bearing on civil recovery. For whenever a penal statute lays down a standard of conduct for the purpose of preventing injury or loss, noncompliance is at least admissible as evidence of negligence (breach of the common law duty to take care). Indeed, not infrequently the unexcused violation of a safety statute is treated as negligence per se, i.e. negligence as a matter of law. Non-observance of such a duty is then "statutorily equivalent to negligence" and commonly described as "statutory negligence".