2004 Tort adjustments in Iowa

Limit on damages HF 00114 when was it passed - or was it passed?

Definition:

A "tort" is an injury to another person or to property, which is compensable under the law. Categories of torts include negligence, gross negligence, and intentional wrongdoing. To give rise to a legal claim in tort, an act (or inaction) must satisfy four elements:

  1. there must be a legal duty of care to another person;
  2. there must be a breach of that duty;
  3. the claimant must have suffered damages, and
  4. the damages must have been proximately caused by the breach of duty.

In addition, North Carolina generally bars lawsuits in tort if the claimant is suing you for negligence but the claimant was also negligent ("contributory negligence"). Contributory negligence will also bar claims against a State agency or department. G.S. 143-299.1 and G.S. 143-291.

four elements

There are four elements to a tort, all of which must be present before the court can order a remedy:

  1. Duty. The defendant must owe a legal duty to the victim. A duty is a legally enforceable obligation to conform to a particular standard of conduct. Except in malpractice and strict liability cases, the duty is set by what a "reasonable man of ordinary prudence" would have done. There is a general duty to prevent foreseeable injury to a victim.
  2. Breach of the duty. The defendant breached that duty.
  3. Causation. The breach was the cause of an injury to the victim. The causation does not need to be direct: defendant's act (or failure to act) could begin a continuous sequence of events that ended in plaintiff's injury, a so-called "proximate cause".
  4. Injury. There must be an injury. In most cases, there must be a physical or financial injury to the victim, but sometimes emotional distress, embarrassment, or dignitary harms are adequate for recovery.

In most torts the defendant's actions were an accident (e.g., defendant was negligent), but torts also cover wrongs where the defendant intended to harm the victim.
Sometimes one sees the statement that the central idea in [most] torts is the concept of fault. Fault is the departure of defendant's conduct a minimum acceptable standard of conduct. In other words, fault is the breach of the duty mentioned above.
I say "most torts", because there are a few, but important, torts in which liability is imposed without finding fault with the defendant's conduct. These so-called strict liability torts include:

  1. products liability
  2. keeping of wild or ferocious animals
  3. abnormally dangerous activities (e.g., storing, transporting, or using explosives in a populated area)

duty

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, in Texas & Pacific Railway v. Behymer, 189 U.S. 468, 470 (1903) said:

What usually is done may be evidence of what ought to be done, but what ought to be done is fixed by a standard of reasonable prudence, whether it usually is complied with or not.

In U.S. v. Carroll Towing Co., 159 F.2d 169 (2dCir. 1947), Judge Learned Hand considered a case in which a tugboat had broken away from a barge, the barge later sank:

... the owner's duty, as in other similar situations, to provide against resulting injuries is a function of three variables: (1) The probability that she will break away; (2) the gravity of the resulting injury, if she does; (3) the burden of adequate precautions. Possibly it serves to bring this notion into relief to state it in algebraic terms: if the probability be called P; the injury, L; and the burden, B; liability depends upon whether B is less than L multiplied by P: i.e., whether

B < P × L

This is one of the few reported judicial decisions in the USA that contains an equation. When I first read this case, I was bothered by the retrospective application of the analysis. After the loss, L, has occurred, it is easy to identify the specific measure(s) that allegedly should have been taken to prevent the loss and focus on just one or two loss-prevention measures. But, before the loss, there are N possible losses, L1, L2, L3, L4, ... LN, each of which can be prevented by measures that cost less than the probability of injury times the amount of loss. But, the manufacturer or service provider might have an uneconomical product or service if all N loss-prevention measures were taken.

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created 29 March 1999, revised 30 Oct 2002
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FHWA reference to tort liability issue - pedestrian / bike planning