TORT ANALYSIS 1 Tort Analysis April Driskel Southern New Hampshire University BUS 206: Business Law Professor Aleksandra Jagiella JD/MBA December 10, 2023
TORT ANALYSIS 2 Tort law involves a separate concept of law and is defined as "wrong or injury to another, other than breach of contract" (Kubasek et al., 2023). There are different types and purposes of torts. The purposes of torts include: 1) To compensate innocent persons who are injured. 2) To prevent private retaliation by injured parties. 3) To reinforce a vision of a just society. 4) To deter future wrongdoings. (Kubasek et al., 2023). Types of torts fall into three categories: 1) Intentional tort (further divided into torts against persons, property, or economic interests) - Defendant acts with intent of engaging in an act that results in injury. 2) Negligent tort - Defendant fails to act as a reasonable person would act, thus resulting in injury. 3) Strict-Liability tort - Defendant takes an action that is considered inherently dangerous to engage in and cannot ever be undertaken safely (Kubasek et al., 2023). In the case of Sunshine Yoga studio owner Jasmine, she suffered injured because of The Dirty Dawg owner Dave's negligence by his failure to maintain the proper and safe storage of a dangerous snake. Jasmine was not directly injured by the snake; however, she did suffer a heart attack because of the surprise encounter with the dangerous animal. In the case of negligent torts, one of the most important components is what a reasonable person would do, which is also something that may be difficult to prove. People who are overly fearful and intimidated easily cannot sue based on their assumptions that bodily harm may occur in an everyday situation, because that is not how a reasonable person would react.
TORT ANALYSIS 3 For negligence to occur, four elements must be present: duty, breach of duty, causation, and damages (Kubasek et al. 2023). Simplified, duty means what reasonable people owe to each other in standards of care. As it applies to Sunshine Yoga owner Jasmine and Dave, the duty would be that a reasonable person would expect to exist without the fear of immediate bodily harm from another person or animal. It's reciprocal in nature, and not one sided. The breach of duty is that Dave failed to uphold the duty of providing a threat free environment to the occupants in his immediate surroundings. Causation has two parts: actual and proximate cause. Actual cause is proof that the injury suffered by the plaintiff is a direct result of the defendant's breach of duty. In the case we are discussing, Jasmine's heart attack was a direct result of Dave's breach of duty in maintaining the proper storage of a dangerous reptile. Proximate cause, also called legal cause, is the extent to which the defendant may be liable for the injuries suffered by the plaintiff were foreseeable when the breach of duty occurred (Kubasek et al., 2023). This is a trickier component of causation, because although