Bus 670 Negligent Tort

Negligent Tort

Michael Hedrick

Bus 670 Legal Environment

Dr. Toni Starcher

June 11th, 2012

Negligence emerged as a district tort sometime during the middle of the nineteenth century. The essence of the tort was that a person should be subject to liability for carelessly causing harm to another. Also essential to negligence, evident form an early date, was the necessity of a casual connection between the defendant's breach of duty and the plaintiff's damage that was natural, probable, proximate, and not to remote (Winfield, 1926). Disputes over how the elements of negligence should be formulated arise every generation or so when the American Law Institute "restates" the law of torts, which is what it is doing now (Dobbs, 2000). The outline of a tort structures how lawyers frame specific issues, which affects how scholars conceive and critique the law and how judges apply it to cases they decide. How the components of negligence are formulated is important to an elemental understanding of the nature of this tort and how it properly should be applied.

There are three main elements of negligent tort. One is Proximate Causation. Proximate Cause concerns the required degree of proximity or closeness between the defendant's breach and the injury it actually caused ( Mallor, Barnes, Bowers, & Langvardt, 2010, pg. 225). It would mean that the reactions caused by a defendant's action may still not make the defendant 100% liable for what happens, only what can be directly correlated to their actions and leaving them free of indirect consequences. Proximate Cause is the primary cause of an incident. It is not necessarily the closest cause in time or space nor the first event that sets in motion a sequence of events leading to an injury. It produces particular, foreseeable consequences without the intervention of any independent or unforeseeable cause. It is also known as legal cause. To help determine the proximate cause of an injury in a...