Torts: Intentional Torts, Negligence, and Strict Liability
Intentional Torts
Battery is harmful or offensive contact; assault is apprehension of imminent contact; false imprisonment is confinement to a bounded area; IIED requires extreme and outrageous conduct plus severe distress. Property torts include trespass to land, trespass to chattels, and conversion. Intent transfers between torts and between victims. Defenses include consent, self-defense, defense of others, defense of property, and necessity.
Negligence
Establish duty, breach, causation (actual and proximate), and damages. The standard is the reasonable person, modified for professionals (custom), children (age-appropriate), and landowners (invitee, licensee, trespasser; the attractive-nuisance doctrine for children). Res ipsa loquitur and negligence per se help prove breach. Proximate cause turns on foreseeability; intervening causes break the chain unless foreseeable, and the eggshell-plaintiff rule applies.
Defenses and Strict Liability
Contributory negligence (complete bar at common law), comparative negligence (pure or modified), and assumption of risk. Strict liability covers wild animals, abnormally dangerous activities, and defective products (manufacturing, design, warning defects; also misrepresentation and warranty theories).
Traps
There is generally no duty to rescue absent a special relationship or creation of peril. Transferred intent does not apply to negligence. Pure economic loss is usually not recoverable in negligence. A rescuer is foreseeable, so the original tortfeasor remains liable.
Worked Example
D leaves a loaded gun on a low shelf; a child finds it and shoots a neighbor. Duty is owed to foreseeable plaintiffs, and the child is foreseeable under attractive-nuisance principles. Rule of thumb: ask whether the harm was within the risk that made the conduct negligent.