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breach, causation, Comparative Responsibility, Contributory Negligence, damages, Duty, last clear chance, tort, Torts

Contributory Negligence and Comparative Responsibility

In History, Law, Legal Education & Pedagogy, Teaching, Torts on July 2, 2014 at 8:45 am

Contributory negligence is an affirmative defense and often a mirror image of the claim of negligence against the defendant. To establish contributory negligence, a defendant generally has to meet all four elements of negligence (duty, breach, causation, damages) in the same way the plaintiff does. Until recently, contributory negligence functioned as a total bar on recovery.

In practice, however, the rule may have been less harsh because juries could decide the plaintiff wasn’t at fault if the defendant appeared to be more at fault (this is a form of jury nullification), and because courts developed ameliorative doctrines such as the “last clear chance rule,” which maintains that even though the plaintiff was contributorily negligent, the defendant had the last clear chance to avoid the injury and thus the plaintiff still recovers. Few states have retained contributory negligence as an absolute bar. Most have moved to comparative responsibility. Once states have made that move, doctrines such as the “last clear chance” become unnecessary.

Once the old contributory negligence regime has been thrown out, what fills the void? The answer, in short, is comparative responsibility. To move from contributory negligence to comparative responsibility is to reject the rule that a plaintiff is barred from recovery if he, too, was careless. Under a comparative responsibility system, the responsibility is split evenly among the parties who were at fault.

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attractive nuisance doctrine, Duty, Invitee, Licensee, Premises Liability, Property, Qualified Duties of Care, Torts, Trespass, Trespasser

Premises Liability and Qualified Duties of Care

In America, Economics, Humanities, Jurisprudence, Law, Philosophy, Property on January 3, 2014 at 8:45 am

The field of premises liability has to do with the potential tort liability of a landholder or landowner for injuries or damages sustained on his property. Such liability is determined not by the legal status of the landholder or landowner, but by the legal status of the injured party. For example, if the injured party is a trespasser, then the landholder or landowner could not have owed the injured party a duty of reasonable care because the landholder or landowner did not know or have reason to know of the trespasser’s presence on his property. A “trespasser” is someone who, without the permission or consent of the landholder or landowner, enters or remains on the landholder’s or landowner’s property. We say that the landholder or landowner does not owe a duty to unforeseeable trespassers, even if the property possesses dangerous conditions, because we believe that people should not be held accountable for the behavior of others that cannot be known or reasonably discovered. If a reasonable person with ordinary intelligence could not infer the existence of Person X on the property, then that reasonable person cannot be made to suffer simply for acting reasonably; after all, we want to encourage reasonable behavior among acting agents within our society.

As with all areas of the law, there are exceptions to the rule that a landholder or landowner owes no duty to trespassers. One such exception is called the “attractive nuisance doctrine,” which maintains that a reasonable landholder or landowner ought to be aware that certain conditions on the property might draw trespassers onto the property. The classic example is a swimming pool that would seem attractive to children and, therefore, would likely lure children onto the property. Another exception involves the existence of paths or shortcuts on the property that might give rise to the reasonable expectation that trespassers will regularly use the paths or shortcuts and, hence, might also injure themselves because of the conditions of the property on or around the paths and shortcuts. In such a situation, a court may deem the landholder or landowner to have owed a duty to the reasonably foreseeable trespassers.

A “licensee” is another legal category of persons on the property of a landholder or landowner. Unlike trespassers, licensees enter or remain on the property of a landholder or landowner with the landholder’s or landowner’s express or implied consent. What distinguishes a “licensee” from an “invitee” (another legal status that will be discussed below) is the fact that the licensee tends to be on the property for his own benefit rather than for the benefit of the landholder or landowner. Examples of licensees include social guests who have entered on the property of another with the intent of visiting the landholder or landowner, who, let us say, is a neighbor. A landholder or landowner generally owes a licensee a duty of reasonable care with regard to activities undertaken on the property, as well as a duty to warn or make safe any dangerous conditions known to the landholder or landowner but not to the licensee. Because a licensee is on the landholder’s or landowner’s property by consent, but not by express invitation, we do not force landholders or landowners to use reasonable diligence to ascertain the existence of dangerous conditions on the property. The costs of holding landholders or landowners to such a high standard (time, money, and energy spent searching the property for conditions that may not exist for the benefit of people who may never enter the property, even if they have the permission to do so) outweigh the potential benefits (reducing the probability that a potential visitor would be injured on the property). Therefore, the duty of a landholder or landowner to a licensee is measured by a standard somewhere between those standards applicable to trespassers and invitees.

An “invitee” is a person having express permission to enter or remain on the property of the landholder or landowner for the benefit of the latter. An example might be a plumber or handyman who has been asked onto the property to perform some service for the landholder or landowner. Landholders and landowners owe a duty of reasonable care to invitees. Because the landholder or landowner is not only aware of the presence of an invitee on the property, but also the very cause of that presence (but for the landholder’s or landowner’s invitation, the invitee would not be on the property), we require the landholder or landowner to inspect the property and to make reasonable efforts to discover dangerous conditions on the property. We also require the landholder or landowner to make any dangerous conditions safe for the invitee.

These categories seem straightforward in theory but are often complicated in practice. What they tell us is that, in the workaday world, “duty” is not sacrosanct; it is contextual and subject to many interpretations depending on the facts at hand and the perceived relationship of the parties.

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An Alternative Way Out of the Philosophy of the Subject, Communication, Communicative Reason, constitutional law, Contracts, Contradictory self-thematizations, diremption model of reason, Evidence, Foucault, Jürgen Habermas, Law professors, paradigm of mutual understanding, Pedagogy, philosophy, power, Pragmatic logic of argumentation, Rationality, Reason, Speech Act, Stanley Fish, The Common Lifeworld, the Enlightenment, the subject, Torts, truth, Validity

Habermas for Law Professors

In Art, Arts & Letters, Communication, Creativity, Essays, Ethics, Habermas, Humanities, Information Design, Jurisprudence, Law, Law-and-Literature, Legal Education & Pedagogy, Legal Research & Writing, Literary Theory & Criticism, Literature, Pedagogy, Philosophy, Politics, Pragmatism, Rhetoric, Rhetoric & Communication, Teaching, Western Civilization, Western Philosophy, Writing on November 4, 2011 at 3:12 pm

This post is an adaptation of this printable, PDF document.

This post is intended to assist law professors who wish to incorporate critical theory (in general) and Habermas (in particular) into their teaching. This post addresses just one essay by Habermas that is representative of his thought. It does not address other important areas of Habermasian theory such as the “public sphere” (a concept that the essay nevertheless implicates).

This post should provide some basic insights into Habermas that could be incorporated into a law school classroom. Contracts in particular would benefit from Habermasian analyses, which could just as constructively be applied to torts, evidence, constitutional law, or any course dealing with litigation and the courtroom. This post provides basic information. It does not tell law professors how to use the information. The use will require creativity.

Fundamental to the paradigm of mutual understanding is … the performative attitude of participants in interaction, who coordinate their plans for action by coming to an understanding about something in the world. When ego carries out a speech act and alter takes up a position with regard to it, the two parties enter into an interpersonal relationship. The latter is structured by the system of reciprocally interlocked perspectives among speakers, hearers, and non-participants who happen to be present at the time.

—Jürgen Habermas, “An Alternative Way Out of the Philosophy of the Subject”[1]

In a way, “An Alternative Way Out of the Philosophy of the Subject” is a response to Foucault’s theories of subjectivity that treat subjects as produced by forces of power. Habermas seems to consider Foucault’s theories as so preoccupied with knowledge formation and structural preconditions for knowledge formation that they (the theories) become pseudoscience abstracted from practical realities. A Foucaultian paradigm centers on subjectivity trained by mechanical forces whereas a Habermasian paradigm explores communicative reason in the context of discourse enabled by the ideations of individual subjects articulating their positions to one another in mutually intelligible utterances.

Contra Foucault, Habermas submits that reason—articulated, assimilated, and mediated by language—must be understood as social. For social interaction to be meaningful, its interlocutors must believe that their articulations are objectively “true” or sincere (I place “true” in quotations because the “pragmatically expanded theory of meaning overcomes [the] fixation on the fact-mirroring function of language”). Speech must be governed by points of common understanding. These points are reached when “ego carries out a speech act and alter takes up a position with regard to it.” Ego, here, refers to a person’s conscious awareness that is capable of being conveyed in speech. “Alter” does not refer to alter ego, but to some agent outside the subjective world of cognition, intention, and belief. This “alter” is part of the external or objective world to which the ego can articulate feelings or thoughts, provided that ego and alter have in common a familiar discursive space (a lifeworld) for their subjective expressions. By this reading, alter has an ego, and ego can be an alter. The terms simply depend upon which subject is articulating his position in a given speech situation; the terms are merely descriptive.

To claim that we can comprehend events or things in the world is to suggest that we can speak about them. To speak about events or things in the world is to convey information about them from one party to another using shared vocabularies governed by rules that the parties accept unconditionally. The interpersonal relationship among or between parties, as Habermas suggests, is “structured by the system of reciprocally interlocked perspectives.” The study of this relationship brings Habermas further away from the Foucaultian paradigms of subjectivity and towards the paradigm of mutual understanding that has come to mark Habermasian thought. Read the rest of this entry »

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“The Differend”, Crimes, François Châtelet, Jean-François Lyotard, law, Plaintiff, Private, Public, punishment, sanction, Silence, sovereign immunity, Statism, the State, Torts, Totalitarianism, victim

Lyotard’s “Differend” and Torts

In Arts & Letters, History, Humanities, Jurisprudence, Law, Law-and-Literature, Legal Education & Pedagogy, Libertarianism, Literary Theory & Criticism, Philosophy, Politics, Rhetoric, Rhetoric & Communication, Western Civilization, Western Philosophy on October 13, 2011 at 12:53 pm

“I would like to call a differend [différend] the case where the plaintiff is divested of the means to argue and becomes for that reason a victim. If the addressor, the addressee, and the sense of the testimony are neutralized, everything takes place as if there were no damages (No. 9). A case of differend between two parties takes place when the ‘regulation’ of the conflict that opposes them is done in the idiom of one of the parties while the wrong suffered by the other is not signified in that idiom.”

—Jean-François Lyotard, from “The Differend”

Lyotard’s term “differend” does not refer to a concrete, tangible thing; it refers to a situation. The situation is one where a plaintiff has lost the ability to state his case, or has had that ability taken from him. He is therefore a victim. If the plaintiff has no voice, he has no remedies because he cannot prove damages. Just as one cannot prove something happened if the proof no longer exists, so one cannot prove something happened if the proof depends upon the approval of another person or party denying or erasing the proof, or having the power to deny or erase the proof. Lyotard describes this situation in relation to power or authority. Because of the nature and function of power or authority, a person or group possessing power or authority can divest the plaintiff of a voice. This divestiture results in what Lyotard calls a “double bind” whereby the referent (“that about which one speaks”) is made invisible. A plaintiff who is wronged by the power or authority cannot attain justice if he has to bring his case before the same power or authority. As Lyotard explains, “It is in the nature of a victim not to be able to prove that one has been done a wrong. A plaintiff is someone who has incurred damages and who disposes of the means to prove it. One becomes a victim if one loses these means. One loses them, for example, if the author of the damages turns out directly or indirectly to be one’s judge.” Specifically, Lyotard uses the differend to describe the situation where victims of the Nazi gas chambers lack the voice to articulate their case in terms of proof because, among other things, the reality or referent is so traumatizing and tragic as to be ineffable.

If Entity A harms me in some way, and Entity A also represents the arbiter or judge before whom I must appeal for justice, Entity A can (and probably will) neutralize my testimony. That is why a State may tax its citizens. In effect, a State has the power or authority to do something—take a person’s earnings against his will and punish or threaten to punish him, by force if necessary, when he fails or refuses to yield his earnings—that a private person or party cannot do. When a private party demands money from a person, and threatens to use force against that person if he does not yield the money, the private party has committed theft. The difference between theft (an unauthorized taking by one who intends to deprive the other of some property) and taxation (an authorized taking by an institution that intends to deprive the other of some property) is the capacity or ability to sanction. The difference depends upon who controls the language: who has the power to privilege one form of signification over another and thus to define, determine, or obliterate the referent.

“Sanction” is a double-edged term: it can mean either to approve or to punish. Both significations apply to the State, which, in Lyotard’s words, “holds the monopoly on procedures for the establishment of reality.” (Note: Lyotard is not referring to any State, but to the “learned State,” a term he borrows from François Châtelet.) Sanction is implicated when a party is harmed, or alleges to have been harmed, whether by the State or by a private party. The State then resolves whether the harm, or the act causing the harm, is “sanctionable”—whether, that is, it receives State approval or condemnation. The State either validates [sanctions] the alleged harm (in which case the alleged harm officially is not a harm), or it condemns the alleged harm (in which case the alleged “harm” is officially constituted as a “harm”) and then punishes [sanctions] the one who caused the harm. In any case, the State sanctions; it enjoys the power to decide what the referent ought or ought not to be. Read the rest of this entry »