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Negligence is a failure to exercise appropriate and/or ethical ruled care expected to be exercised amongst specified circumstances. The area of tort law known as negligence involves harm caused by failing to act as a form of carelessness possibly with extenuating circumstances. The core concept of negligence is that people should exercise reasonable care in their actions, by taking account of the potential harm that they might foreseeably cause to other people or property.
In law and insurance, a proximate cause is an event sufficiently related to an injury that the courts deem the event to be the cause of that injury. There are two types of causation in the law: cause-in-fact, and proximate cause. Cause-in-fact is determined by the "but for" test: But for the action, the result would not have happened. The action is a necessary condition, but may not be a sufficient condition, for the resulting injury. A few circumstances exist where the but for test is ineffective. Since but-for causation is very easy to show, a second test is used to determine if an action is close enough to a harm in a "chain of events" to be legally valid. This test is called proximate cause. Proximate cause is a key principle of Insurance and is concerned with how the loss or damage actually occurred. There are several competing theories of proximate cause. For an act to be deemed to cause a harm, both tests must be met; proximate cause is a legal limitation on cause-in-fact.
A tort is a civil wrong that causes a claimant to suffer loss or harm, resulting in legal liability for the person who commits the tortious act. In some, but not all, civil and mixed law jurisdictions, the term delict is used to refer to this category of civil wrong, though it can also refer to criminal offences in some jurisdictions and tort is the general term used in comparative law. The word tort stems from Old French via the Norman Conquest and Latin via the Roman Empire. The word 'tort' was first used in a legal context in the 1580s, although different words were used for similar concepts prior to this time.
In criminal and civil law, strict liability is a standard of liability under which a person is legally responsible for the consequences flowing from an activity even in the absence of fault or criminal intent on the part of the defendant.
Trespass is an area of tort law broadly divided into three groups: trespass to the person, trespass to chattels, and trespass to land.
This article addresses torts in United States law. As such, it covers primarily common law. Moreover, it provides general rules, as individual states all have separate civil codes. There are three general categories of torts: intentional torts, negligence, and strict liability torts.
Vicarious liability is a form of a strict, secondary liability that arises under the common law doctrine of agency, respondeat superior, the responsibility of the superior for the acts of their subordinate or, in a broader sense, the responsibility of any third party that had the "right, ability or duty to control" the activities of a violator. It can be distinguished from contributory liability, another form of secondary liability, which is rooted in the tort theory of enterprise liability because, unlike contributory infringement, knowledge is not an element of vicarious liability. The law has developed the view that some relationships by their nature require the person who engages others to accept responsibility for the wrongdoing of those others. The most important such relationship for practical purposes is that of employer and employee.
An ultrahazardous activity in the common law of torts is one that is so inherently dangerous that a person engaged in such an activity can be held strictly liable for injuries caused to another person, even if the person engaged in the activity took every reasonable precaution to prevent others from being injured. In the Restatement of the Law 2d, Torts 2d, the term has been abandoned in favor of the phrase "inherently dangerous activity."
English tort law concerns the compensation for harm to people's rights to health and safety, a clean environment, property, their economic interests, or their reputations. A "tort" is a wrong in civil, rather than criminal law, that usually requires a payment of money to make up for damage that is caused. Alongside contracts and unjust enrichment, tort law is usually seen as forming one of the three main pillars of the law of obligations.
An intentional tort is a category of torts that describes a civil wrong resulting from an intentional act on the part of the tortfeasor. The term negligence, on the other hand, pertains to a tort that simply results from the failure of the tortfeasor to take sufficient care in fulfilling a duty owed, while strict liability torts refers to situations where a party is liable for injuries no matter what precautions were taken.
Tortious interference, also known as intentional interference with contractual relations, in the common law of torts, occurs when one person intentionally damages someone else's contractual or business relationships with a third party, causing economic harm. As an example, someone could use blackmail to induce a contractor into breaking a contract; they could threaten a supplier to prevent them from supplying goods or services to another party; or they could obstruct someone's ability to honor a contract with a client by deliberately refusing to deliver necessary goods.
A slip and fall injury, also known as a trip and fall, is a premises liability claim, a type of personal injury claim or case based on a person slipping on the premises of another and, as a result, suffering injury. It is a tort. A person who is injured by falling may be entitled to monetary compensation for the injury from the owner or person in possession of the premises where the injury occurred.
Vosburg v. Putney, 80 Wis. 523, 50 N.W. 403, was an American torts case that helped establish the scope of liability in a battery. The case involved an incident that occurred on February 20, 1889 in Waukesha, Wisconsin. A 14-year-old boy, Andrew Vosburg, was kicked in his upper shin by an 11-year-old boy, George Putney, while the two were in their schoolhouse's classroom. Unbeknownst to Putney, Vosburg had previously injured his knee, and after the incident he developed a serious infection in the area that required physicians to drain pus and excise bone, and left him with a weakness in his leg for the rest of his life. The verdict of the lawsuit's first trial was set aside, and in the second trial the jury awarded Vosburg $2500 in compensatory damages.
Causation is the "causal relationship between the defendant's conduct and end result". In other words, causation provides a means of connecting conduct with a resulting effect, typically an injury. In criminal law, it is defined as the actus reus from which the specific injury or other effect arose and is combined with mens rea to comprise the elements of guilt. Causation only applies where a result has been achieved and therefore is immaterial with regard to inchoate offenses.
A dog bite is a bite upon a person or other animal by a dog, including from a rabid dog. More than one successive bite is often called a dog attack, although dog attacks can include knock-downs and scratches. Though some dog bites do not result in injury, they can result in infection, disfigurement, temporary or permanent disability, or death. Another type of dog bite is the "soft bite" displayed by well-trained dogs, by puppies, and in non-aggressive play. Dog bites can occur during dog fighting, as a response to mistreatment, trained dogs working as guard, police or military animals, or during a random encounter.
In RePolemis & Furness, Withy & Co Ltd (1921) is an English tort case on causation and remoteness in the law of negligence.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and introduction to tort law in common law jurisdictions:
Market share liability is a legal doctrine that allows a plaintiff to establish a prima facie case against a group of product manufacturers for an injury caused by a product, even when the plaintiff does not know from which defendant the product originated. The doctrine is unique to the law of the United States and apportions liability among the manufacturers according to their share of the market for the product giving rise to the plaintiff's injury.
The eggshell rule is a well-established legal doctrine in common law, used in some tort law systems, with a similar doctrine applicable to criminal law. The rule states that, in a tort case, the unexpected frailty of the injured person is not a valid defense to the seriousness of any injury caused to them.
Cattle trespass was an ancient common law tort whereby the keeper of livestock was held strictly liable for any damage caused by the straying livestock. Under English law the tort was abolished by section 1(1)(c) of the Animals Act 1971, but the tort continues to subsist in other common law jurisdictions, either in its original form as a common law tort, or as modified by statute.
References
- ↑ Henderson, J.A. et al. The Torts Process, Seventh Edition. Aspen Publishers, New York, NY: 2007, p. 426
- ↑ Henderson, p. 427
- ↑ Alwin v. State Farm Fire and Casualty Co., 237 Wis.2d 253 (2000)
- ↑ "Hicks v. Nunnery, 643 N.W.2d 809, P. 86 (Wis. Ct. App. 2002) (Dykman, J., dissenting)". Archived from the original on 2011-07-16. Retrieved 2010-07-14.