Negligence law aims to compensate victims harmed by someone acting without appropriate care. Four elements must be established: duty, breach, harm, and cause. Negligence per se occurs when a law is broken resulting in harm. Defenses include comparative and contributory negligence.
Malpractice law is a sphere of civil law that aims to secure compensation for victims who have been harmed by someone acting without the appropriate level of assistance. For an action for negligence to be valid, four elements must be established: a duty to the victim, a breach of that duty by the negligent party, harm which results to the victim, and the breach which is the cause of that harm. Furthermore, the negligence law holds that some actions result in an automatic violation regardless of other facts, called negligence per se. Any party that has acted negligently can raise one or more claims to reduce or deny the claim, usually contributory negligence or comparative negligence.
The four main elements of negligence law are duty, tort, damage, and proximate cause. A duty may arise from a particular relationship between the parties, for example, an employer and his employee, a guest, or a doctor and his patient. A breach of this obligation generally occurs when the party exercising the obligation acts in such a way that he does not exercise the care with which a reasonable person in your position would act. Damage to the victim is typically measured in financial terms, and in personal injury cases, the court has the ability to award financial damages to compensate for any pain and suffering in addition to reimbursement of medical costs. In determining whether the violation was a proximate cause of harm, the court will typically ask whether the harm would have occurred “if not for” the violation in question.
In some cases, the elements of duty and breach of negligence law are automatically satisfied by the circumstances regardless of other operational facts, which is called negligence itself. This usually occurs when there is a law in place that the negligent party violates resulting in harm to the victim. The classic example of negligence per se is an automobile accident in which the negligent party is driving over the posted speed limit. By breaking the speeding law and causing the accident, the driver will be deemed to be negligent in themselves regardless of other facts.
The law of negligence has two main defenses that negligent parties can bring to exclude or reduce the victim’s claim. Most jurisdictions recognize comparative negligence whereby the negligent party can claim that the victim’s negligence also contributed to the accident. The investigator will assess the circumstances, determine to what extent the victim was responsible for the damage and reduce the compensation for damages accordingly. A minority of jurisdictions recognize the doctrine of contributory negligence where if the victim was at fault for at least half the cause of the damage, they are completely barred from collection by the negligent party.
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