Duty of care


In tort law, a duty of care is a legal obligation which is imposed on an individual requiring adherence to a standard of reasonable care while performing any acts that could foreseeably harm others. It is the first element that must be established to proceed with an action in negligence. The claimant must be able to show a duty of care imposed by law which the defendant has breached. In turn, breaching a duty may subject an individual to liability. The duty of care may be imposed by operation of law between individuals who have no current direct relationship but eventually become related in some manner, as defined by common law.
Duty of care may be considered a formalisation of the social contract, the implicit responsibilities held by individuals towards others within society. It is not a requirement that a duty of care be defined by law, though it will often develop through the jurisprudence of common law.

Development of the ''general'' duty of care

At common law, duties were formerly limited to those with whom one was in privity one way or another, as exemplified by cases like Winterbottom v. Wright. In the early 20th century, judges began to recognize that the cold realities of the Second Industrial Revolution implied that enforcing the privity requirement against hapless consumers had harsh results in many product liability cases. The idea of a general duty of care that runs to all who could be foreseeably affected by one's conduct first appeared in the judgment of William Brett, Master of the Rolls, in Heaven v Pender. Although Brett's formulation was rejected by the rest of the court, similar formulations later appeared in the landmark U.S. case of MacPherson v. Buick Motor Co. and, in the UK, in Donoghue v Stevenson. Both MacPherson and Donoghue were product liability cases, and both expressly acknowledged and cited Brett's analysis as their inspiration.

Scope

Although the duty of care is easiest to understand in contexts like simple blunt trauma, it is important to understand that the duty can be still found in situations where plaintiffs and defendants may be separated by vast distances of space and time.
For instance, an engineer or construction company involved in erecting a building may be reasonably responsible to tenants inhabiting the building many years in the future. This point is illustrated by the decision of the South Carolina Supreme Court in Terlinde v. Neely 275 S.C. 395, 271 S.E.2d 768, later cited by the Supreme Court of Canada in Winnipeg Condominium Corporation No. 36 v. Bird Construction Co. 1 S.C.R. 85:

Responsibility

Although the idea of a general duty of care is now widely accepted, there are significant differences among the common law jurisdictions concerning the specific circumstances under which that duty of care exists. Obviously, courts cannot impose unlimited liability and hold everyone liable for everyone else's problems; as Justice Cardozo put it, to rule otherwise would be to expose defendants "to a liability in an indeterminate amount for an indeterminate time to an indeterminate class." There must be some reasonable limit to the duty of care; the problem is where to set that limit.

England

Whether a duty of care exists depends firstly on whether there is an analogous case in which the Courts have previously held there to exist a duty of care. Situations in which a duty of care have previously been held to exist include doctor and patient, manufacturer and consumer, and surveyor and mortgagor. Accordingly, if there is an analogous case on duty of care, the court will simply apply that case to the facts of the new case without asking itself any normative questions.
If there is no similar case that the court will determine whether there is a duty of care by applying the three normative criteria the House of Lords set out in Caparo Industries plc v Dickman,. The criteria are as follows:
The High Court of Australia has deviated from the British approach, which still recognises a proximity element. Rather, Australian law first determines whether the case at hand fits within an established category of case where a duty of care has been found. For example, occupiers of a premises automatically owe a duty of care to any person on their premises.
If this is not the case, then the plaintiff must prove that it was reasonably foreseeable that harm could result from the defendant's actions. If so, the Court then applies a 'salient features' test to determine whether the plaintiff is owed a duty of care. Some of the salient features which the Court considers in making this inquiry include:
  1. Whether imposition of a duty of care would lead to 'indeterminate liability' – that is, it would interfere with the legitimate protection or pursuit of an individual's social or business interests.
  2. Whether imposition of a duty would constitute an unreasonable burden on individual autonomy.
  3. The degree of vulnerability of the plaintiff to the defendant's actions – their ability to guard against the harm.
  4. The degree of knowledge which the defendant had about the probability and likely magnitude of harm to the plaintiff.
Special rules exist for the establishment of duty of care where the plaintiff suffered mental harm, or where the defendant is a public authority.
To establish a duty of care, the plaintiff has to satisfy the requirement of CLA Act ss 27–33. In light of this, a large number of individuals cannot claim injuries as well. Meanwhile, compared to the ‘No-Fault Compensation’ system in New Zealand, the cost to claim injuries is much higher. In light of this, individuals especially the victims who lack knowledge or capability may choose not claim private nuisance after balancing the burden and outcomes. This view affirmed by Regina Graycar, he states that the courts in Australia are reluctant to award damages for personal injuries.
In New South Wales, a plaintiff is able to recover for non-economic loss, including pain and suffering, loss of amenities/expectation of life and disfigurement, upon the severity of the loss being at least 15% of 'most extreme case'.
As of October 2016, NSW Attorney General, Gabrielle Upton, has updated the maximum amount of damages for non-economic loss from $594,000 to $605,000.

France

On 27 March 2017, the French National Assembly adopted a law entitled “Devoir de vigilance des entreprises donneuses d'ordre”, whose title has been translated into English as a "duty of vigilance" or "duty of care".
The law will oblige large French companies to:

Sweden

does not have such a law.

United States

Because each of the 50 U.S. states is a separate sovereign free to develop its own tort law under the Tenth Amendment, there are several tests for finding a duty of care in United States tort law.

Foreseeability test

In several states, like Florida and Massachusetts, the sole test is whether the harm to the plaintiff from the defendant's actions was foreseeable.

Multi-factor test

The Supreme Court of California, in a majority opinion by Justice David Eagleson, criticized the idea that foreseeability, standing alone, constitutes an adequate basis on which to rest the duty of care: "Experience has shown that... there are clear judicial days on which a court can foresee forever and thus determine liability but none on which that foresight alone provides a socially and judicially acceptable limit on recovery of damages."
Drawing upon the work of scholars such as Fowler V. Harper, Fleming James Jr., and William Prosser, California has developed a complicated balancing test consisting of multiple factors which must be carefully weighed against one another to determine whether a duty of care exists in a negligence action.
California Civil Code section 1714 imposes a general duty of ordinary care, which by default requires all persons to take reasonable measures to prevent harm to others.
In the 1968 case of Rowland v. Christian, the court held that judicial exceptions to this general duty of care should only be created if clearly justified based on the following public-policy factors:
A 1997 case added to this:
Contemporary California appellate decisions treat the Rowland decision as the "gold standard" for determining the existence of a legal duty of care, and generally refer to the criteria for determining the existence of a legal duty of care as the Rowland factors.
In California, the duty inquiry focuses on the general category of conduct at issue and the range of foreseeable harm it creates, rather than the specific actions or injuries in each case. Appellate lawyer Jeffrey Ehrlich persuaded the California Supreme Court to clarify the central importance of this distinction with its 2011 decision in Cabral v. Ralphs Grocery Co. which requires "no duty" rulings to be based on categorical public-policy rules that can be applied to a range of cases, without reference to detailed facts. By requiring courts to apply the Rowland factors at this high level of factual generality, the Cabral decision preserved the role of juries in determining whether the defendant breached its duty of care based on the unique circumstances of each case.
A majority of U.S. states have adopted some kind of multi-factor analysis based on the work of Prosser and others. Some states simply copied California's factors but modified them, like Michigan, while others developed different lists of factors, such as this one from Tennessee:
A 2011 law review article identified 43 states that use a multifactor analysis in 23 various incarnations; consolidating them together results in a list of 42 different factors used by U.S. courts to determine whether a duty of care exists.
The Tennessee Court of Appeal has also recently followed the California Supreme Court's lead by citing Cabral for the proposition that duty determinations must be made at the highest level of factual generality.

Measurement

Once a duty exists, the plaintiff must show that the defendant breached it. This is generally treated as the second element of negligence in the United States. Breach involves testing the defendant's actions against the standard of a reasonable person, which varies depending on the facts of the case. For example, physicians will be held to reasonable standards for members of their profession, rather than those of the general public, in negligence actions for medical malpractice.
In turn, once the appropriate standard has been found, the breach is proven when the plaintiff shows that the defendant's conduct fell below or did not reach the relevant standard of reasonable care.
However, it is possible that the defendant took every possible precaution and exceeded what would have been done by any reasonable person, yet the plaintiff was injured. If that is the case, then as a matter of law, the duty of care has not been breached and the plaintiff cannot recover in negligence. This is the key difference between negligence and strict liability; if strict liability attaches to the defendant's conduct, then the plaintiff can recover under that theory regardless of whatever precautions were taken by the defendant.

Examples

Products

Product liability was the context in which the general duty of care first developed. Manufacturers owe a duty of care to consumers who ultimately purchase and use the products. In the case of Donoghue v Stevenson AC 562 of the House of Lords, Lord Atkin stated:

Land

At common law, in the case of landowners, the extent of their duty of care to those who came on their premises varied depending on whether a person was classified as a trespasser, licensee, or invitee. This rule was eventually abolished in some common law jurisdictions. For example, England enacted the Occupiers Liability Act 1957. Similarly, in the 1968 landmark case of Rowland v. Christian, the Supreme Court of California replaced the old classifications with a general duty of care to all persons on one's land, regardless of their status. After several highly publicized and controversial cases, the California Legislature enacted a statute in 1985 that partially restored immunity to landowners from some types of lawsuits from trespassers.
Colorado's highest court adopted the Rowland unified duty of care analysis in 1971. The resulting explosion of lawsuits against Colorado landowners caused the state legislature to enact the Colorado Premises Liability Act in 1986, which enacted a cleaned-up statutory version of the common law classifications and simultaneously expressly displaced all common law remedies against landowners in order to prevent state courts from again expanding their liability.
In the Republic of Ireland, under the Occupiers' Liability Act, 1995, the duty of care to trespassers, visitors and "recreational users" can be restricted by the occupier; provided reasonable notice is given, for which a prominent notice at the usual entrance to the premises usually suffices.

Business

In business, "the duty of care addresses the attentiveness and prudence of managers in performing their decision-making and supervisory functions." The "business judgment rule presumes that directors carry out their functions in good faith, after sufficient investigation, and for acceptable reasons. Unless this presumption is overcome, courts abstain from second-guessing well-meaning business decisions even when they are flops. This is a risk that shareholders take when they make a corporate investment."
The Duty of Care Risk Analysis Standard provides principles and practices for evaluating risk. It considers all parties that could be affected by those risks. DoCRA evaluates safeguards if they are appropriate in protecting others from harm while presenting a reasonable burden by defining what is reasonable risk. It helps establish reasonable security based on an organization's specific mission, objective, and obligations.