Principles Of Negligence

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The principle of negligence is to determine a guilty party when someone acts in a careless manner and causes injury to another person. Negligence names the careless person legally liable. In order to win, the plaintiff must prove four different elements. The first element that must be proven is Duty of Care. The defendant must have owed the plaintiff legal duty of care. This comes in many different forms. Legal duty, for example, is present when operating a vehicle. The driver must drive with a certain level of care as to not injure or damage anyone or anything. The law recognizes one party has a legal obligation to act in a certain manner toward the other in a relationship between two parties. Next, Breach of Duty must be proven. Breach of …show more content…

The plaintiff files a negligence claim so the defendant uses a contributory negligence claim against the plaintiff that effectively states the injury was caused partially because of the plaintiff's own actions; This is a contributory negligence counterclaim. If the defendant successfully proves the claim, the plaintiff may be totally or partially restricted from recovering damages. Comparative Negligence happens when each party’s negligence for a given injury is weighed when determining damages. There are two approaches with this method: pure comparative negligence and modified comparative negligence. For pure comparative, plaintiff damages are totalled and then reduced to reflect their contribution. For example, is the plaintiff is awarded $1,000 and the judge or jury says the plaintiff is 25% responsible for the incident, the plaintiff will actually get $750. For modified comparative, the plaintiff will not recover if they are found to be equally or more responsible for the injury. This is the most common approach. There was an accident in which the plaintiff was injured and sued the defendant for $100,00 to cover the cost of his injuries. The jury states the plaintiff was 20% at fault. Based upon contributory negligence the plaintiff will recover nothing. The plaintiff is barred from recovering because he acted negligently and contributed to the accident. Under the pure comparative negligence, the plaintiff will recover 80%, or $80,000, because he was less than 50% responsible for the accident and will be responsible for 20%, or $20,000. Under the modified comparative negligence, the plaintiff will still recover the same monetary amount as pure comparative negligence because he is less than 50% responsible for the