Torts: Intentional Torts, Negligence, Strict Liability, and Defamation
What the MEE tests
Torts tests intentional interference, negligence duty and breach, causation, strict liability, products liability, defamation, privacy, nuisance, and damages.
Core rules
- Intentional torts: battery requires harmful or offensive contact with intent; assault requires apprehension of imminent contact; false imprisonment requires confinement; IIED requires extreme outrageous conduct and severe distress. Defenses include consent, self-defense, and necessity.
- Negligence: duty, breach, actual cause, proximate cause, and damages. Duty is owed to foreseeable plaintiffs; the Cardozo approach limits duty to a foreseeable class, while Andrews considers foreseeability generally. Breach is measured by the reasonable person; custom and statute may set the standard.
- Strict liability: abnormally dangerous activities and defective products. Products claims include manufacturing defect, design defect, and failure to warn.
- Defamation: defamatory statement, publication, identification, and harm; constitutional limits require actual malice for public officials and public figures. Privileges include truth, absolute, and qualified.
- Damages: compensatory, nominal, and punitive; comparative negligence reduces recovery; joint and several liability may apply.
Worked example
A manufacturer sells a power saw without a guard. A worker is injured while using the saw as intended. The worker sues for design defect. The court asks whether the design is unreasonably dangerous and whether a reasonable alternative design existed. The absence of a guard may support a design defect and a failure-to-warn claim. The worker must show the defect existed when the saw left the manufacturer and caused the injury. Comparative fault may reduce damages but does not necessarily bar recovery.
Traps
There is no general duty to rescue absent a special relationship or causation of peril. Pure economic loss is generally not recoverable in negligence. Defamation requires publication to a third party. Assault requires apprehension, not contact.