BREACH:

Once a plaintiff has established and proven that a defendant owned a duty of care to the plaintiff, the second element of negligence a plaintiff must prove is a breach of that duty of care. This is when a person or company has a duty of care to another, and fails to live up to that standard of care. A plaintiff must prove that the defendant’s act or omission caused the plaintiff to be exposed to unreasonable risk of injury and/or harm. In other words, the defendant failed to meet their obligation to the plaintiff and therefore put the plaintiff in harm’s way.

Res Ipsa Loquitur:

Bad things happen all the time to people that shouldn’t. In some circumstances, a defendant may be in the best, or only, position to prove why this bad thing happened to someone. This is the legal theory of res ipsa loquitur, which is Latin for “the thing speaks for itself.” Just the fact that a certain event occurred and caused harm to someone establishes the defendant’s breach of duty of care. Airplane crashes would be an example of this. To establish res ipsa loquitur, three requirements must be met which are:

1. This event is not something that normally happens without negligence.
2. This negligence would be attributed to the defendant since this is an event they are responsible for preventing.
3. Neither the plaintiff nor any other third party is responsible for the harm to the plaintiff.

Taking our example of an airplane crash, we can answer all three requirements. First, airplane crashes do not normally occur without negligence. They are rare events. Second, the negligence of an airplane crash would be with the airline since they are responsible for preventing them. Third, the passengers are not responsible for the harm caused them when a plane crashes. We therefore have res ipsa loquitur, the negligence of an airline when a plane crashes speaks for itself. The burden would then be on the airline to show they did not breach their duty of care to its passengers.

Negligence per se:

We have numerous criminal and civil statutes that prohibit certain acts or omissions that are safety related. The violation of such a statute may establish the breach of a duty of care. This is the legal theory called negligence per se. For example, we mentioned above that there are rules of the road such as speed limits that all drivers are expected to obey. If a defendant is therefore speeding while involved in an accident with a plaintiff, the defendant’s violation of the speed limit statute may be negligence per se, and therefore established the breach of a duty of care to the plaintiff by the defendant.