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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.
Product liability is the area of law in which manufacturers, distributors, suppliers, retailers, and others who make products available to the public are held responsible for the injuries those products cause. Although the word "product" has broad connotations, product liability as an area of law is traditionally limited to products in the form of tangible personal property.
In law, 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.
Trespass is an area of criminal law or tort law broadly divided into three groups: trespass to the person, trespass to chattels and trespass to land.
Palsgraf v. Long Island Railroad Co., 248 N.Y. 339, 162 N.E. 99 (1928), is a leading case in American tort law on the question of liability to an unforeseeable plaintiff. The case was heard by the New York Court of Appeals, the highest state court in New York; its opinion was written by Chief Judge Benjamin Cardozo, a leading figure in the development of American common law and later a United States Supreme Court justice.
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.
Nuisance is a common law tort. It means that which causes offence, annoyance, trouble or injury. A nuisance can be either public or private. A public nuisance was defined by English scholar Sir J. F. Stephen as,
"an act not warranted by law, or an omission to discharge a legal duty, which act or omission obstructs or causes inconvenience or damage to the public in the exercise of rights common to all Her Majesty's subjects".
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.
William Lloyd Prosser was the Dean of the College of Law at UC Berkeley from 1948 to 1961. Prosser authored several editions of Prosser on Torts, universally recognized as the leading work on the subject of tort law for a generation. It is still widely used today, now known as Prosser and Keeton on Torts, 5th edition. Furthermore, in the 1950s, Dean Prosser became Reporter for the Second Restatement of Torts.
In tort law, a duty of care is a legal obligation which is imposed on an individual requiring adherence to a standard of reasonable care while performing any acts that could foreseeably harm others. It is the first element that must be established to proceed with an action in negligence. The claimant must be able to show a duty of care imposed by law which the defendant has breached. In turn, breaching a duty may subject an individual to liability. The duty of care may be imposed by operation of law between individuals who have no current direct relationship but eventually become related in some manner, as defined by common law.
In some common law jurisdictions, contributory negligence is a defense to a tort claim based on negligence. If it is available, the defense completely bars plaintiffs from any recovery if they contribute to their own injury through their own negligence.
In its broadest sense, no-fault insurance is any type of insurance contract under which insureds are indemnified for losses by their own insurance company, regardless of fault in the incident generating losses. In this sense, it is no different from first-party coverage. However, the term "no-fault" is most commonly used in the context of state/provincial automobile insurance laws in the United States, Canada, and Australia, in which a policyholder are not only reimbursed by the policyholder’s own insurance company without proof of fault, but also restricted in the right to seek recovery through the civil-justice system for losses caused by other parties.
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.
United States v. Reynolds, 345 U.S. 1 (1953), is a landmark legal case in 1953 that saw the formal recognition of the state secrets privilege, a judicially recognized extension of presidential power.
Garratt v. Dailey, 46 Wash. 2d 197, 279 P.2d 1091 is a famous American tort law case that illustrates the principle of "intent" for intentional torts.
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, or they could obstruct someone's ability to honor a contract with a client by deliberately refusing to deliver necessary goods.
Volenti non fit iniuria is a common law doctrine which states that if someone willingly places themselves in a position where harm might result, knowing that some degree of harm might result, they are not able to bring a claim against the other party in tort or delict. Volenti applies only to the risk which a reasonable person would consider them as having assumed by their actions; thus a boxer consents to being hit, and to the injuries that might be expected from being hit, but does not consent to his opponent striking him with an iron bar, or punching him outside the usual terms of boxing. Volenti is also known as a "voluntary assumption of risk".
Breaking the chain refers in English law to the idea that causal connections are deemed to finish. Even if the defendant can be shown to have acted negligently, there will be no liability if some new intervening act breaks the chain of causation between that negligence and the loss or damage sustained by the claimant.
Indiana Harbor Belt Railroad Co. v. American Cyanamid Co., 916 F.2d 1174 is a decision of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit authored by Judge Richard Posner. The case has subsequently become a staple of first year Torts courses taught in American law schools, where the case is used to address the question of when it is better to use negligence liability or strict liability.
References
- ↑ The Act (S.543) was signed by President Clinton on 18 June 1997 and became effective ninety days thereafter. It was Pub. L. 105-19, 111 Stat. 221, and is codified at 42 U.S.C. 14501-05.
- ↑ "Federal Volunteer Protection Act" (PDF).
- ↑ See generallyProsser and Keeton on Torts, 5th Edition (West Group 1984) ISBN 0-314-09256-0 (Prosser & Keeton); Prosser, Wade, and Schwartz's Torts: Cases and Materials, 10th Edition (Foundation Press 2000) ISBN 1-56662-955-1 (Prosser & Wade); Restatement of the Law, Second, Torts 2d, Revised Edition (American Law Institute 1965)(Restatement); Harper, James and Gray on Torts, Third Edition (Aspen Publishers 1995)(Harper & James); Exploring Tort Law, M. Stuart Madden (Cambridge University Press, 2005) ISBN 0-521-85136-X.