subject: Breaking Down What Constitutes Negligence [print this page] In general, negligent conduct is recklessness that causes personal injury to someone else. It could be an activity, like recklesslessly knocking a rock off a rooftop, or a failure to behave, like a landlord who doesn't fix a damaged step. A negligent action regularly creates the basis for injuries legal cases.
To bring a legal case for negligence, the injury victim (the man or woman filing the legal action) must demonstrate four things: That the accused (the individual or entity being sued) owed the injured party a duty of reasonable care; that the defendant failed to use due care towards the plaintiff (i.e. breached the duty); that the defendant's breach of duty caused the plaintiff's harm; and that the injury victim suffered damages as a end result.
Duty of care: The plaintiff has to demonstrate that the accused had a duty of care toward the injury victim. Somebody has a duty to avoid causing harm to another if a reasonable person in the same situation could foresee that an activity (or failure to behave) could result in an injury. Some circumstances are very clear. We all know that a person could be injured if we run a red light, so we have a duty of due care to follow traffic regulations and signals. Other scenarios are more complicated. If a property owner has a private swimming pool in a fenced yard, does he have a duty to prevent a neighbor child from climbing the fence and accidentally drowning in the pool? How much care would a reasonable man or woman take in that scenario? In each situation, the conditions concerning the harm play an essential role in identifying whether or not a accused had a duty of care towards the injury victim.
Breach of Duty: The injured party needs to prove that the negligent parties failed to carry out their duty of care. For example, a normal individual could foresee that a van full of dynamite may ignite, so someone who parks such a vehicle in a packed parking lot has breached the duty of care to the other men and women nearby. If the vehicle ignites, the driver may very well be guilty of negligent conduct. An individual might possibly also foresee that a car that isn't fixed adequately might malfunction, so if the brakes on a poorly maintained car fail and the car hits a kid, the owner of the car might have breached the duty of due care to that child. Just about every car owner has a duty to maintain the car in a safe condition. Alternatively, if the owner frequently maintains and repairs the car and the brakes failed because the brakes were faulty or the mechanic made a mistake, the owner did not breach a duty of care, though the brake manufacturer or the mechanic may be responsible.
Cause: The injured party will need to demonstrate that the negligent persons breach of duty triggered the personal injury for which the injured party is suing. Sometimes causation is obvious. If you run a traffic light and hit a person, you clearly caused the personal injury. If the pedestrian's elderly mother has a heart attack and dies when she hears of her daughter's injury, did you result in that injury? Not likely, but those are the kinds of challenges that have to be resolved in a negligent conduct claim. There can also be issues about what damage was caused by an accident. People today often have more than one accident in their lives, so if someone has had two prior back injuries, what injury to the back was caused by the most recent fall down a flight of stairs?
Damages: Damages in a negligence claim try to put the injury victim in the same position he or she would be in if the accident hadn't taken place. A injured party will need to demonstrate the monetary value of his or her injuries. For example, if someone is disabled and may no longer work, a calculation of damages would consider the job of the injured party and the amount he or she would have earned during the time left in a normal working career. Damages would also include medical costs and estimated costs for medical care, special accommodations, and assisted living.
In some cases defendants are responsible for negligence as a result of the operation of law, and not because they immediately caused an injury. As an example, since an employer is held accountable for injuries caused by employees during work, UPS may be liable if a UPS driver has an accident while making deliveries. A hospital may be held at fault for injury caused by only one nurse. Injured parties typically make claims against several defendants to make sure there will be enough assets (money) to pay a judgment.
