Legal Liability: Negligence, Torts, and Defenses
A candidate must know the four elements of negligence: duty, breach, causation (actual and proximate), and damages. Duty is generally owed to foreseeable plaintiffs; premises liability varies by the entrant's status (invitee, licensee, trespasser), though many jurisdictions have moved toward a reasonable-care standard. Proximate cause asks whether the injury was a foreseeable result of the breach; intervening causes can break the chain unless the intervening act was foreseeable.
Torts divide into negligence, intentional torts (battery, assault, false imprisonment, trespass, conversion), and strict liability (abnormally dangerous activities, defective products). Defenses include contributory negligence (a complete bar in a few jurisdictions), comparative negligence (pure or modified, reducing recovery by the plaintiff's fault), and assumption of risk (the plaintiff knowingly and voluntarily encountered a known danger).
Traps in questions: mixing up assault (apprehension of imminent harmful contact) with battery (actual harmful or offensive contact); treating comparative negligence as a complete bar; overlooking that intentional torts are excluded from most liability policies but the resulting damages may still be covered if the insured lacked intent to injure; and forgetting that proximate cause is a policy-coverage question as well as a tort question.
Rule of thumb: duty, breach, cause, harm - if any element fails, there is no negligence. Worked example: a store mops a floor and posts no sign. A customer slips and breaks a wrist. Duty exists (business invitee), breach exists (failure to warn), actual cause exists (the wet floor caused the fall), proximate cause exists (a fall is foreseeable), and damages exist. The store is liable; comparative fault might reduce damages if the customer was texting and ignoring the obvious hazard.