Torts

An intentional tort happens when someone means to do the act that causes the harm. They do not have to intend the exact injury, only the conduct.

• Battery: intentional harmful or offensive contact without consent, shoving someone, throwing a drink at them.
• Assault: intentionally making someone reasonably fear immediate harmful contact. No touching required; the fear is the injury.
• False imprisonment: intentionally confining someone without lawful authority and without their consent, when they know about it or are harmed by it.
• Defamation: a false statement of fact, communicated to someone else, that damages a person's reputation. Written is libel; spoken is slander. Truth is a complete defense, and pure opinion is not defamation.

Most tort cases are negligence cases. Nobody meant to hurt anyone; someone was simply careless. A plaintiff must prove four things, and losing any one of them loses the case:

• Duty. The defendant owed the plaintiff a duty of reasonable care. Drivers owe it to other people on the road; property owners owe it to visitors.
• Breach. The defendant failed to act as a reasonably careful person would in the same situation. This is measured objectively, "I was doing my best" is not enough.
• Causation. The breach actually caused the harm. Courts start with the "but for" test: but for the careless conduct, would this injury have happened?
• Harm. Real, provable loss, medical bills, lost wages, property damage, pain and suffering. A near miss with no injury is not negligence.

"But for" causation reaches very far, but for your decision to drive today, you would not have been in that intersection at all. So courts add a second limit called proximate cause. The question is whether the harm was a foreseeability, a reasonably predictable result of the conduct, rather than a freak chain of events. If the injury is too remote or too bizarre, the law cuts off liability even though the conduct was careless.

An intervening cause is an event that happens after the defendant's conduct and contributes to the harm. Intervening causes do not automatically excuse the defendant. If the later event was itself foreseeable, the ambulance ride, a rescuer getting hurt, a second driver braking hard around a wreck, the original careless party can still be liable. Only when the later event is so unforeseeable that it seems unfair to keep blaming the first actor does the law call it a superseding cause and cut off liability.

Damages fall into three groups:

• Compensatory (economic): measurable losses such as medical bills, repair costs, and lost wages.
• Compensatory (non-economic): pain, suffering, and loss of enjoyment of life.
• Punitive: extra money awarded only for outrageous or reckless conduct, meant to punish and deter. Rare, and limited by state law.

Common defenses:

• Comparative fault: most states reduce the award by the plaintiff's own percentage of fault. In some states, being more than half at fault bars recovery entirely.
• Contributory negligence: in a small number of states, any fault by the plaintiff bars recovery.
• Assumption of risk: the plaintiff knowingly accepted a risk that is inherent in an activity, like getting hit by a ball at a batting cage.
• Consent: a defense to intentional torts, such as ordinary contact in a contact sport.
• Statute of limitations: the filing deadline, commonly a small number of years and set by each state.