Contributory negligence is a legal defense where the injured party is argued to have contributed to their injury. Jurisdictions follow either a pure or modified comparative negligence approach to determine liability for negligence claims. In a pure approach, compensation is awarded based on the percentage of fault assigned to each party, while in a modified approach, the injured party can no longer receive damages once their level of guilt exceeds a certain number (usually 50% or 51%).
Contributory negligence is a type of legal defense in which one party argues that the injured party contributed to his or her injuries. For example, suppose a truck driver hits a man riding a bicycle and the man sues the truck driver for malpractice. Suppose also that the man was wearing dark clothing while cycling at night and that he was cycling along a busy highway not designed for bikers. The truck driver may be able to successfully argue that the motorcyclist contributed to his injuries, exempting or reducing the driver’s liability.
In general, contributory negligence is a common law defense brought forward in order to disprove a claim of negligence in a tort suit. Different jurisdictions follow various rules when determining whether to award damages for concurrent negligence. In a jurisdiction that follows a pure contributory negligence approach, a person can recover damages for injury only if he did not contribute to the accident at all. With this approach, the motorcyclist in the above truck crash scenario would not recover anything because he contributed to the crash by wearing dark clothes and riding his bicycle on a busy highway at night.
Most jurisdictions have modified the strict contributory negligence approach and follow a comparative negligence approach. With this method, an injured person can recover damages even if he was partly responsible for the accident. Personal injury would, however, be reduced, depending on the degree to which the person contributed to the accident.
Mainly two types of comparative approaches are used to determine liability for negligence claims: pure and modified. In a pure comparative negligence system, the investigator assigns a percentage of blame to each negligent party. Compensation for damages is then awarded based on the percentage. For example, suppose a jury finds that the motorcyclist sustained $10,000 in damages and that the fault lies with 70% of the accident and 30% with the driver. In that scenario, the driver would only pay 30% of the rider’s damages, or $3,000 USD.
A modified comparative negligence approach works similarly, with the investigator assigning a percentage of blame to each party and awarding damages accordingly. There is a key difference, however. With a modified approach, once the injured party’s level of guilt exceeds a certain number, he or she can no longer receive any damages. Most jurisdictions using this approach set this number at 50% or 51%. In the bicycle accident example above, with the modified approach, the rider would have recovered nothing because he was 70% at fault for the accident.
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