Intentional Torts
An action for battery lies whenever a defendant, without consent or privilege, touches the plaintiff in a manner that merits one of these two descriptions.
What are harmful or offensive?
The Learned Hand formula for assessing reasonable behavior looks at these three variables.
What are gravity of harm, likelihood of harm, and cost of prevention?
Breach is to negligence what this is to products liability.
What is defect?
At common law, joint tortfeasors were held liable in accordance with this principle.
What is joint and several liability?
A contractual exculpatory clause that expressly precludes actions for negligence is enforceable unless it violates this.
What is public policy?
In many jurisdictions, the plaintiff cannot recover for false imprisonment unless she is this with respect to the physical confinement.
What is conscious?
A plaintiff who cannot point to direct evidence of negligence may nevertheless prevail by invoking this incantatory Latin phrase.
What is res ipsa loquitur?
Modern products liability law identifies these three types of defect.
What are manufacturing defects, design defects, and warning defects?
Damages in personal injury cases are customarily divided into two separate categories. Those categories are usually described in terms of one of these two dichotomies.
What are "special" and "general" damages, or "economic" and "non-economic" damages?
In jurisdictions that have abolished contributory negligence, courts have most often replaced it with pure comparative fault, whereas legislatures have more often replaced it with this.
What is modified comparative fault?
Conduct giving rise to a claim for intentional infliction of emotional distress must lead a reasonable person to exclaim this.
What is "outrageous!"?
A plaintiff may sometimes recover on a "loss-of-chance" theory when this element of negligence is mathematically impossible to establish.
What is causation in fact?
Of the three types of defect that characterize modern products liability law, only this kind of defect really merits the label "strict liability."
What is a manufacturing defect?
Under current Supreme Court case law, the measurement of punitive damages may account for harm to non-parties only for purposes of assessing this.
What is the reprehensibility of the defendant's conduct?
Implied assumption of risk describes scenarios in which the plaintiff voluntarily encounters this.
What is a known risk?
In an action for trespass, the plaintiff will recover these even in the absence of any actual (compensatory) damages.
What are nominal damages?
According to this pair of cases, plaintiff may not recover unless the type of damage is foreseeable.
What is "Wagon Mound"?
Product misuse is a defense against products liability claims only when the misuse is this.
What is unforeseeable?
A defendant held jointly and several liable for all of the plaintiff's injuries may recover from a fellow tortfeasor under a statute governing this.
What is contribution among joint tortfeasors?
In a majority of jurisdictions, this chronological contention is not a complete defense to an action for nuisance.
What is "coming to the nuisance"?
The measure of damages in an action for trespass to chattels is this.
What is actual diminution in value?
A superseding cause typically merits these three adjectives.
What are extraordinary, independent, and unforeseeable?
In Daly v. General Motors Corp., the California Supreme Court imported this defense, drawn from negligence law, to limit the defendant's liability.
What is comparative fault?
According to the Tennessee Supreme Court, joint and several liability should not survive the emergence of this.
What is comparative fault?
"Secondary implied assumption of risk" describes scenarios in which the plaintiff's decision to encounter a risk is this.
What is unreasonable?