Stephen Schultz | January 17, 2025 | Personal Injury
“Negligence per se” is a specific legal concept that frequently arises in personal injury cases. It is a type of negligence case, which is one of the most common types of personal injury claims. While all negligence per se cases involve negligence, not every negligence case qualifies as negligence per se. The key difference is that negligence per se involves a violation of a specific law or regulation, which is automatically considered negligent, whereas other negligence cases may require proof of a breach of duty without reference to a specific legal standard.
Negligence: Definition
Most people don’t typically use the word “negligence” in everyday conversation unless they’re discussing a legal issue. In casual terms, “carelessness” is the closest equivalent. However, negligence carries more legal complexity than mere carelessness. While negligence is often associated with car accidents, it also applies to a wide range of other personal injury cases.
Negligence includes four specific elements that you must prove to win a personal injury claim:
- Duty of care: The duty to exercise reasonable care to avoid harming someone else. This might mean a duty to do something (stop at a red light, for example) or a duty not to do something (serve alcohol to an intoxicated guest, for example).
- Breach of duty: The defendant’s failure to meet the demands of whatever duty that applies to the plaintiff’s claim. Once you establish a breach of duty, you have established negligence. At a trial, the jury generally determines a breach of duty.
- Causation: The defendant’s negligence was a direct and foreseeable cause of the plaintiff’s damages.
- Damages: The law can compensate you with monetary damages for the harm you suffered. In other words, compensability is what transforms harm into damages. However, not all types of harm are eligible for compensation.
You must establish all four of these elements under a “preponderance of the evidence” standard. This means that the evidence in the case must indicate a greater than 50% likelihood that each of the foregoing elements is true with respect to your claim.
Negligence Per Se: Definition
What is negligence per se? As explained above, you need to prove four elements to establish liability for negligence–duty of care, breach of duty, causation, and damages. Negligence per se provides you with a shortcut. If you establish negligence per se, you thereby establish the first two elements of negligence liability–duty of care and breach of duty.
The personal injury case King vs. Morgan is a Missouri legal precedent that lawyers can use to establish the legitimacy of using the concept of negligence per se in a personal injury case. From this case and other legal precedents, here is what you have to prove to establish negligence per se:
- There is a legal standard (a statute or regulation, for example) that imposes a clear standard of conduct. Note that a jury is not involved in determining the requirements of the law.
- The purpose of this legal standard is to protect against a specific type of harm (traffic accidents, for example).
- The defendant violated the legal standard.
- You must be among the class of people that the legal standard aimed to protect. Since a traffic law aims to protect pedestrians, passengers, and other drivers, for example, just about anyone would fall within the class of people that the legal standard aimed to protect.
- The harm you suffered must be of the type of harm that the legal standard aimed to prevent. This might work as negligence per se. For example, if you fell down a flight of stairs because the construction of the handrail violated the applicable building code.
You must prove every one of these elements to establish negligence per se.
Establishing Negligence Per Se is Not Enough to Prove Liability
Under negligence per se, the legal standard in question provides the standard of care. It might provide specifications for routing electrical wiring in a building, for example. The defendant’s violation of the legal standard established a breach of duty.
Nevertheless, you need to prove more than this to hold the defendant liable for monetary damages. You must also prove causation and damages. Negligence per se can help you establish the first two elements of negligence but not the last two.
Contact Our Personal Injury Law Firm in St. Louis, MO
If you’ve been injured, please contact the attorneys at Schultz & Myers Personal Injury Lawyers at the nearest location to schedule a free consultation, we proudly serve all throughout Missouri, including St. Louis County and Boone County and we have offices in St. Louis, Ladue, Columbia, Creve Coeur.
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