A tort can be defined as a civil wrong. Examples of torts are trespass, nuisance, negligence and defamation. One of the main examples of tort law is negligence. Negligence is to breach a duty of care or to fall below a standard of behaviour. This standard of behaviour can also be said as falling below the standard of care of the ‘reasonable careful man’. The reasonable man is a ‘person’ that sets a standard of how a typical person should act in different circumstances. Reasonableness is a big factor in negligence.
The law of negligence is imposed to try and make a person have those around them in mind before carrying out an action that could cause damage or loss to those around them. There are four main elements of negligence liability: duty of care, breach of duty of care, damage or injury and causation. To prove negligence the plaintiff must establish these four elements .Together those elements form the tort of negligence .One of the key cases in negligence is Donoghue v Stevenson. In
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The defendant argued that the plaintiff had inappropriate footwear and she was walking on the grass and not the footpath at the time of the accident. The duty manager gave evidence that the plaintiff had not been wearing appropriate footwear when he arrived to the scene. The defendant owed a duty of care to its visitors and it was reasonably foreseeable that the mud on the path could be a danger to these visitors. The plaintiff was also to fault as it was reasonably foreseeable that with the footwear she was wearing that walking on the muddy path would be dangerous while carrying the small child on her back. The court decided to reduce the damages by 25 percent by way of contributory negligence. The courts decision seems reasonable as both the defendant and plaintiff had breached a duty of