Assignment 6

1. What is the difference between criminal law and tort law?

2. What are the conditions for strict liability and negligence?

3. What does it mean that an event A caused another event B? Give an example.

4. What is legal causation? Give an example.

5. What were the reasons for the court's decision in Lynch vs. Fisher? Do you agree - why or why not?

6.What were the reasons for the court's decision in Palsgraff vs. LIRR? Do you agree - why or why not?

1) Criminal law is focused on the wrongdoer him/herself and how the criminal should be punished. Tort law focuses on how the victim should be compensated, such as a financial compensation.

2) The conditions for strict liability can cover a situations where legal responsibility is given whether or not the the person held responsible is actually at fault or not. It is a situation where someone has to be held responsible. Strict liability usually applies in a scenario involving product liability (in tort law), where a possible defective product might have caused an injury to the plaintiff.

Negligence involves the harm done to a victim as a result of carelessness, usually as a breach of duty, or absence of a job/favor that the defendant should have done for the plaintiff. Duty, standard of care, breach of duty, cause-in-fact, and proximate cause are included in the conditions for negligence.

3) When one says that "event A caused event B", it is meant that event B could not have occurred if event A did not occur first. Event A had to have happened to bring about event B. For example, event A could be someone spilling oil into a healthy, thriving ecosystem that had no other source of potential contaminants besides the spill. Event B would encompass negative effects of the oil spill in the ecosystem that occurred has a direct result of the oil spill.

4) Causation covers the circumstances between action and result. Factual causation is considered before legal causation. Factual causation consists of using the logic mentioned in the previous question, whether event B would have occurred without event A occurring first. If the answer is no, then a conclusion is reached. There is a direct relation between the action and the harm done to the plaintiff. If not, legal (proximate) causation is considered, where the harm is done to the plaintiff indirectly. For example, a principal makes the mistake of giving a child a time out when it wasn't the child's fault. When the child walks back to his class, he slips on a spill that occurred while he spent time in the principal's office. If he had not been mistakenly called to the principal's office, he probably would not have been at the site of the spill later that day. This is a case where the proximate act of the principal's mistake affected the probability of the child slipping on the spill, even though the principal did not mean to harm the child at all.

5) The court decision was that the truck driver was at fault. This was a case of proximate cause. The truck was poorly parked out of negligence. Of course he did not intend to do any harm, but Fisher parked his truck in a dangerous spot, which was enough for proximate cause, which is why the court found him liable. I do agree with this decision because the shot fired from Lynch and the surrounding events would not have occurred had Fisher not been in position in the first place. This is a solid example of a case of proximate cause.

6)  The court ruled that the LIRR (Long Island Rail Railroad) was not guilty. I agree with this because this case seemed to be an example of an intervening cause, which was the third party. The third party was the men with the box of firecrackers. In my opinion, Palsgraff sued the wrong party. The intervening cause rightfully took the blame away from LIRR. There was no negligence, or breach of duty owed to the plaintiff, on the side of LIRR. I agree with the decision that Palsgraff was not determined to be in a foreseeable zone of danger, unless, every train station was required to check every single parcel for potentially dangerous items brought into the tracks before this court case happened.