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Negligence (Lat. negligentia) [1] is a failure to exercise appropriate care expected to be exercised in similar circumstances. [2]Within the scope of tort law, negligence pertains to harm caused by the violation of a duty of care through a negligent act or failure to act.
The tort of negligence is a cause of action leading to relief designed to protect legal rights [g] from actions which, although unintentional, nevertheless cause some form of legal harm to the plaintiff. In order to win an action for negligence, a plaintiff must prove: duty, breach of duty, causation, scope of liability, and damages.
Causation is typically a bigger issue in negligence cases than intentional torts. However, as mentioned previously, it is an element of any tort. The defendant's act must be an actual cause and a proximate cause of the result in a particular cause of action.
Contributory negligence – A defense based on negligence of the plaintiff wherein the plaintiff's actions caused the event which drew the suit. An example of this is a pedestrian crossing a road carelessly and was hit by a driver driving carelessly.
The tort of negligence is however increasing in importance over other types of tort, providing a wide scope of protection, especially since Donoghue v Stevenson. For liability under negligence, a duty of care must be established owed to a group of persons to which the victim belongs, a nebulous concept into which many other categories are being ...
In the United States, the Hand formula, also known as the Hand rule, calculus of negligence, or BPL formula, is a conceptual formula created by Judge Learned Hand which describes a process for determining whether a legal duty of care has been breached (see negligence).
Likewise, damage can occur without negligence, for example, when someone dies from a fatal disease. In cases involving suicide, physicians and particularly psychiatrists may be to a different standard than other defendants in a tort claim. In most tort cases, suicide is legally viewed as an act which terminates a chain of causality.
The doctrine of contributory negligence was dominant in U.S. jurisprudence in the 19th and 20th century. [3] The English case Butterfield v.Forrester is generally recognized as the first appearance, although in this case, the judge held the plaintiff's own negligence undermined their argument that the defendant was the proximate cause of the injury. [3]