Torts
What the exam tests
Torts tests intentional torts, negligence, strict liability, products liability, defamation, privacy, and defenses.
Core rules
- Intentional torts. Battery requires harmful or offensive contact with intent; assault requires apprehension of imminent contact; false imprisonment requires confinement without consent; IIED requires extreme and outrageous conduct and severe emotional distress.
- Negligence. Duty, breach, actual cause, proximate cause, and damages. Duty is owed to foreseeable plaintiffs under Palsgraf. Proximate cause is limited by foreseeability; intervening causes can supersede.
- Defenses. Comparative negligence, contributory negligence, and assumption of risk. Negligence per se uses a statute to set the standard when the plaintiff is in the protected class and the harm is the type the statute aims to prevent.
- Strict liability and products. Abnormally dangerous activities and defective products. Products claims include manufacturing defect, design defect, and failure to warn. The economic-loss rule limits tort recovery for purely economic losses.
- Defamation. Defamatory statement, publication, identification, and damages. Public officials and figures must prove actual malice.
Worked example
A driver runs a red light and hits a pedestrian. The pedestrian is taken to the hospital, where a doctor negligently treats the leg injury. The driver remains liable for the original injury and for the aggravation caused by the doctor’s negligence if medical treatment was foreseeable. The doctor’s malpractice is a foreseeable intervening cause, not a superseding cause.
Traps
Do not confuse assault with battery; do not overlook the eggshell-plaintiff rule; do not apply strict liability to ordinary products; do not forget the public-figure malice standard; do not treat every intervening act as superseding.