Intentional Torts
The doctrine where an actor intends one intentional tort or harms an unintended victim, and that intent shifts to the resulting tort or victim.
What is Transferred Intent?
The default objective benchmark used by courts to measure whether an adult defendant's conduct fell below the required standard of care in a negligence action.
What is the Reasonably Prudent Person (RPP) under similar circumstances?
The standard default test used by courts to establish cause-in-fact in a standard negligence action.
What is the "But-For" Test?
The traditional common law rule holding that two negligent defendants who combine to cause a single indivisible injury are each individually liable for 100% of the judgment.
What is Joint and Several Liability?
A homeowner invites a neighbor over to her house for a casual weekend dinner party.
What is the neighbor's legal entrant classification?
What is a Licensee?
The sub-category of compensatory damages that compensates a plaintiff for out-of-pocket, objectively verifiable financial losses like medical bills and lost wages.
What are Special (or Economic) Damages?
The baseline common law rule regarding whether a bystander has a legal obligation to assist a drowning stranger in peril.
What is there is no legal duty to rescue a stranger in peril (no liability for nonfeasance)?
Dan intentionally snatches a dinner plate out of Paul's hands while shouting, without touching Paul's skin.
What is Battery?
A 16-year-old operates a motorized personal watercraft (jet ski) at high speeds on a crowded lake and collides with a swimmer.
What standard of care is applied to evaluate the 16-year-old's conduct?
What is the Adult Reasonably Prudent Person standard (under the Adult Activity Exception)?
Two independent, uncoordinated campfires merge simultaneously to destroy a barn, and either fire alone contained sufficient volume to burn the barn down.
What test establishes factual causation against the campfire creators?
What is the Substantial Factor Test?
The legal mechanism used by a joint tortfeasor who paid 100% of a judgment to collect proportionate reimbursement from co-defendants based on their share of fault.
What is Contribution?
The reason a homeowner is NOT liable to a social guest when a porch step collapses due to rotted support beams that were completely unknown to the homeowner.
What is landowners owe NO duty to inspect the premises to discover unknown hazards for licensees?
The sub-category of compensatory damages that covers non-monetary, subjective harm such as physical pain and emotional suffering.
What are General (or Non-Economic) Damages?
The level of misconduct committed by a voluntary emergency rescuer that is NOT shielded by Good Samaritan immunity statutes.
What is gross negligence or intentional/reckless misconduct?
The unique intentional tort where legal liability can be based on reckless behavior rather than specific purpose or substantial certainty.
What is Intentional Infliction of Emotional Distress (IIED)?
Under Learned Hand's algebraic calculus ($B < PL$), a defendant breaches their duty of care when this condition is met.
What is when the Burden of taking precautions is less than the Probability of harm times the Gravity of Loss?
The rule requiring a negligent tortfeasor to pay for the full physical extent of a plaintiff's injuries, even if unexpectedly severe due to a preexisting medical condition.
What is the Eggshell Skull Rule?
A delivery employee takes a minor two-block detour along his assigned route to buy a coffee at a drive-thru and negligently rear-ends another car in line. Why is the employer vicariously liable for the crash?
What is because a minor detour for personal comfort is within the scope of employment?
The primary affirmative duty owed by a commercial business owner to a customer that is NOT owed to a social guest.
What is the affirmative duty to inspect the premises to discover non-obvious dangerous conditions?
Under traditional common law, the rule prohibiting a defendant from introducing evidence that the plaintiff's health insurance paid for her medical bills.
What is the Collateral Source Rule?
A statute requires apartment window guards to prevent toddlers from falling out. A adult guest slips on a wet floor inside the apartment and hits the window, breaking his arm.
Why does Negligence Per Se fail to establish liability against the landlord?
What is because an adult falling on a floor is not the specific type of harm the window guard statute was enacted to prevent?
A car salesman refuses to return a customer's car keys for two hours to force her to stay in the showroom and negotiate.
What is False Imprisonment?
A driver ignores a passenger who yanks the steering wheel once; two minutes later, the passenger yanks it again and causes a crash.
Why is the driver liable for breach of duty for failing to take precautions after the first incident?
What is because the first wheel-grab placed the driver on notice, making repeat passenger misconduct foreseeable?
A driver negligently breaks a pedestrian's leg in a crash. At the hospital, the treating physician negligently sets the bone incorrectly, worsening the injury.
Is the original driver still legally responsible for the aggravated injury caused by the physician? Why or Why not?
What is because ordinary medical malpractice is a foreseeable, dependent intervening cause?
A commercial building owner hires an independent contractor company to repair the elevators in a building open to the public. The contractor performs the repair negligently, injuring a visitor inside.
Why is the building owner liable despite hiring an independent contractor?
What is because landowners owe a non-delegable duty to maintain safe premises in areas open to the public?
A customer in a Florida grocery store slips on spilled oil that was dropped by another shopper 30 seconds earlier.
Why does the customer's claim fail under Florida Statute § 768.0755?
What is because 30 seconds is insufficient to establish that the store had actual or constructive knowledge of the spill?
An accident victim unreasonably refuses a simple, routine $5,000 medical procedure, causing her injury to worsen and require $50,000 in additional care.
How much can she recover for the $50,000 worsened condition?
What is $0 (nothing for the aggravated harm) under the Doctrine of Avoidable Consequences / Duty to Mitigate?
A heavy metal mixing paddle falls out of an upper-story bakery window and strikes a passerby, with no direct evidence explaining how it fell.
What doctrine allows the jury to infer negligence on the part of the bakery?
What is Res Ipsa Loquitur?
Dan becomes enraged at Arthur during an argument in a crowded park. Dan picks up a heavy wooden stick and swings it forcefully at Arthur's head, intending to strike him. Arthur ducked just in time, but the stick slipped out of Dan's hand, flew through the air, and shattered the windshield of Carla's nearby parked car, severely frightening Brenda who was standing two feet away.
Which intentional torts can be established against Dan, and under what doctrine?
What is Assault against Brenda and Trespass to Chattels against Carla, under the doctrine of Transferred Intent?
The legal effect of proving that a defendant fully complied with all standard industry customs when defending against a claim of breach of duty.
What is compliance with custom is evidence of due care, but is NOT conclusive proof of reasonableness?
A gas company negligently leaves a natural gas line leaking. After weeks of complaints, no repairs made. An employee walks by and flicks their cigarette in the gas leak causing a massive explosion.
What is the legal effect of the lit cigarette on the gas company's liability?
What is it acts as an intervening cause that does not break the chain of proximate cause?
A contractor leaves an unfenced water pit with floating foam boards on a lot near a school. A 7-year-old child trespasses, climbs onto a board, and falls in.
What defense can the contractor raise to defeat liability under the Restatement § 339 Attractive Nuisance Doctrine?
What is proving that the child actually understood and appreciated the specific danger?
The heightened threshold of misconduct beyond simple negligence required for a court to award punitive damages.
What is intentional, willful, wanton, malicious, or reckless misconduct?
In Florida, the legal effect of violating a non-traffic penal statute compared to violating a traffic regulation.
What is a non-traffic penal violation is Negligence Per Se, whereas a traffic regulation violation is merely evidence of negligence?
An employee borrows her coworker's custom $3,000 mountain bike without permission to ride to the corner store for 10 minutes. While parked outside the store, the bike is hit by a delivery truck and completely destroyed. The coworker sues the employee for Conversion.
How will the court measure damages, and why does this qualify as Conversion rather than Trespass to Chattels?
What is a forced sale for the full market value ($3,000) of the bike, because total destruction constitutes a substantial dominion and severe interference with chattel?