One who commits a tortuous act is called a toreadors. The equivalent of tort in civil law Jurisdictions is depict. Tort may be defined as a personal injury; or as “a civil Torts may be categorized in several ways: one such way is to divide them into Negligence, Intentional Torts, and Quasi-Torts. The standard action in tort is negligence. The tort of negligence provides a cause of action leading to damages, or to relief, in each case designed to protect legal rights, including those of personal safety, property, and, in some cases, intangible economic interests.
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Negligence actions include claims coming primarily from car accidents and personal injury accidents of many kinds, including clinical negligence, worker’s negligence and so forth. Product liability cases, such as those involving warranties, may also be noninsured negligence actions, but there is frequently a significant overlay of additional lawful content. Intentional torts include, among others, certain torts arising from the occupation or use of land. The tort of nuisance, for example, involves strict liability for a neighbor who interferes with another’s enjoyment of his real property.
Trespass allows owners to sue for entrances by a person (or his structure, such as an overhanging building) on their land. Several intentional torts do not involve land. Examples include false imprisonment, the tort of unlawfully arresting or detaining someone, and defamation (in some Jurisdictions split into libel and slander), where false information is broadcast and damages the plaintiffs reputation. Negligence Negligence is a tort which depends on the existence of a breaking of the duty of care owed by one person to another. One well-known case is Donahue v Stevenson where Mrs..
Donahue consumed part of a drink containing a decomposed snail while in a public bar in Paisley, Scotland and claimed that it had made her ill. The snail had not been visible, as the bottle of beer in which it was contained was opaque. Neither the rend who bought the bottle for her, nor the shopkeeper who sold it, were aware of the snail’s presence. The manufacturer was Mr.. Stevenson, whom Mrs.. Donahue sued for damages for negligence. She could not sue Mr.. Stevenson for damages for breach of contract because there was no contract between them.
The majority of the members of the House of Lords agreed (: ratio) that Mrs.. Donahue had a valid claim, but disagreed as to why such a claim should exist. Lord MacMillan thought this should be treated as a new product liability case. * The plaintiff was owed a Duty of care * There was a Dereliction or breach of that duty The toreadors directly caused the injury [but for the defendant’s actions, the plaintiff would not have suffered an injury]. * The plaintiff suffered Damage as a result of that breach * The damage was not too remote; there was proximate cause.
Duty of care The first element of negligence is the legal duty of care. This concerns the relationship between the defendant and the plaintiff, which must be such that there is an obligation upon the defendant to take proper care to avoid causing injury to the plaintiff in all the circumstances of the case. There are two ways in which a duty of are may be established: * the defendant and plaintiff are within one of the ‘special relationship’; or * Outside of these relationships, according to the principles developed by case law.
There are a number of situations in which the courts recognize the existence of a duty of care. These usually arise as a result of some sort another, employer to employee, manufacturer to consumer, doctor to patient and solicitor to client. Dereliction or breach of that duty Dereliction of duty generally refers to a failure to conform to rules of one’s Job, which will vary by tasks involved. It is a failure or refusal to perform assigned duties in a desiccators manner.
Dereliction of duty on the part of an employee may be cause for disciplinary action, which will vary by employer. It may refer to a failure by an organization member to abide by the standing rules of its constitution or by-laws or perform the duties of the position appointed to. Injury directly caused by the toreadors The negligent act of the thereafter must be connected to the injuries suffered. Damage as a result of that breach For many torts, damage is a necessary part of the tort.
Thus, it is not enough to demonstrate that you have suffered the wrong in order to win a tort case, you must also have legally recognized damages that were directly or indirectly caused by the as a result of the tort, and be able to prove the extent of those damages. Proximate cause Proximate cause means that you must be able to show that the harm was caused by the tort you are suing for. (http://www. Lexis’s. Com/alcohol/study/outlines/HTML/ torts/torts. Tm) The defense may argue that there was a prior cause or a superseding intervening cause. A common situation where a prior cause becomes an issue is the personal injury auto accident, where the person re-injures an old injury. For example money who has a bad back is injured in the back in an auto accident. Years later they are still in pain. They must prove the pain is caused by the auto accident, and not the natural progression of the previous problem with the back. A superseding intervening cause happens shortly after the injury.
For example, if after the accident the doctor who works on you commits malpractice and injures you further, the defense can argue that it was not the accident, but the incompetent doctor who caused your injury. Statutory torts A statutory tort is like any other, in that it imposes duties on private or public parties; over they are created by the legislature, not the courts. One example is in consumer protection, with the Product Liability Directive in the European Union, where businesses making defective products that harm people must pay for any damage resulting.
Liability for bad or not working products is strict in most jurisdictions. The theory of risk spreading provides support for this approach. Since manufacturers are the ‘cheapest cost avoiders’, because they have a greater chance to seek out problems, it makes sense to give them the incentive to guard against product defects. Another example is occupiers’ liability, which was seen as overly complex and illogical; so many Jurisdictions replaced the common law rules for occupiers’ liability with statutory torts. Statutory torts also spread across workplace health and safety laws and health and safety in food.
Such torts as often grouped in with quasi-torts. Defamation Defamation is tarnishing the reputation of someone; it has two varieties, slander and libel. Slander is spoken defamation and libel is printed or broadcast defamation. The evidence does not exist. Defamation does not affect or hinder the voicing of opinions, UT does occupy the same fields as rights to free speech in the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, or Article of the European Convention of Human Rights. Related to defamation in the U. S. Re the actions for misappropriation of publicity, invasion of privacy, and disclosure. Abuse of process and malicious prosecution are often classified as dignitary torts as well. Intentional torts Intentional torts are any intentional acts that are reasonably foreseeable to cause harm to an individual, and that do so. Intentional torts have several subcategories: Torts against the person include assault, battery, false imprisonment, intentional infliction of emotional distress, and fraud. * Property torts involve any intentional interference with the property rights of the claimant (plaintiff.
Those commonly recognized include trespass to land, trespass to chattels (personal property), and conversion. Economic torts Economic torts protect people from interference with their trade or business. The area includes the doctrine of restraint of trade and has largely been submerged in the twentieth century by statutory interventions on collective labor law and modern antitrust or competition law. The “absence of any unifying principle drawing together the different heads of economic tort liability has often been remarked upon. Theory and reform Scholars and lawyers have identified conflicting aims for the law of tort, to some extent reflected in the different types of damages awarded by the courts: compensatory, aggravated and punitive. In The Aims of the Law of Tort 0, Galilee Williams saw four possible bases on which different torts rested: appeasement, justice, deterrence and compensation. Overlap with criminal law There is some overlap between criminal law and tort, since tort, a private action, used o be used more than criminal laws in the past.
For example, in English law an assault is both a crime and a tort (a form of trespass to the person). A tort allows a person, usually the victim, to obtain a remedy that serves their own purposes (for example by the payment of damages to a person injured in a car accident, or the obtaining of injunctive relief to stop a person interfering with their business). Criminal actions on the other hand are pursued not to obtain remedies to assist a person – although often criminal courts do have power to grant such remedies – but to remove their liberty on the state’s behalf.
That explains why incarceration is usually available as a penalty for serious crimes, but not usually for torts. The more severe penalties available in criminal law also mean that it requires a higher burden of proof to be discharged than the related tort. For example, in the O. J. Simpson murder trial, the Jury was not convinced beyond reasonable doubt that O. J. Simpson had committed the crime of murder; but in a later civil trial, the Jury in that case felt that there was sufficient evidence to meet the standard of preponderance of the evidence required to prove the tort of wrongful death. Law of Contract
A contract is an agreement entered into voluntarily by two parties or more with the intention of creating a legal obligation, which may have elements in writing, though contracts can be made orally. The remedy for breach of contract can be “damages” or contract or an injunction. Both of these remedies award the party at loss the “benefit of the bargain” or expectation damages, which are greater than mere reliance damages, as in promissory estoppels. The parties may be natural persons or Juristic persons. A contract is a legally enforceable promise or undertaking that something will or will not occur.
The word promise can be used as a legal synonym for contract. , although care is required as a promise may not have the full standing of a contract, as when it is an agreement without consideration. Elements At common law, the elements of a contract are offer, acceptance, intention to create legal relations, and consideration. Mutual assent At common law, mutual assent is typically reached through offer and acceptance, that is, when an offer is met with an acceptance that is unqualified and that does not vary the offers terms.
The latter requirement is known as the “mirror image” rule. If a reported acceptance does vary the terms of an offer, it is not an acceptance but a counteroffer and, therefore, simultaneously a rejection of the original offer. The Uniform Commercial Code notably disposes of the mirror image rule in S although the USC only governs transactions in goods in the USA. Offer and acceptance The most important feature of a contract is that one party makes an offer for an arrangement that another accepts.
This can be called a concurrence of wills or consensus ad idem (meeting of the minds) of two or more parties Consideration Consideration is something of value given by a promissory to a promise in exchange or something of value given by a promise to a promissory. Typically, the thing of value is a payment, although it may be an act, or forbearance to act, when one is privileged to do so, such as an adult refraining from smoking. Sufficiency Consideration must be sufficient, but courts will not weight the adequacy of consideration. For instance, agreeing to sell a car for a penny may constitute a binding contract.
All that must be shown is that the seller actually wanted the penny. This is known as the peppercorn rule. Otherwise, the penny would constitute nominal consideration, which is insufficient. Parties may do this for tax purposes, attempting to disguise gift transactions as contracts. Other Jurisdictions Roman law-based systems (including Scotland) do not require consideration, and some commentators consider it unnecessary. Civil law systems take the approach that an exchange of promises, or a concurrence of wills alone, rather than an exchange in valuable rights is the correct basis.
Law of Agency The law of agency is an area of commercial law dealing with a set of contractual, quasi-contractual and non-contractual relationships that involve a person, called the gent, that is authorized to act on behalf of another (called the principal) to create a legal relationship with a third party. This branch of law separates and regulates the relationships between: * Agents and principals; * Principals and the third parties when the agents purport to deal on their behalf. The concepts The reciprocal rights and liabilities between a principal and an agent reflect commercial and legal realities.
A business owner often relies on an employee or another person to conduct a business. In the case of a corporation, since a corporation is a fictitious legal person, it can only act through human agents. The principal is bound by the contract entered into by the agent, so long as the agent performs within the scope of the agency. A third party may rely in good faith on the representation by a person who identifies himself as an agent for another. It is not always cost effective to check whether someone who is represented as having the authority to act for another actually has such authority.
If it is subsequently found that the alleged agent was acting without necessary authority, the agent will generally be held liable. Brief statement of legal principles There are three broad classes of agent . Universal agents hold broad authority to act on behalf of the principal, e. G. They may hold a power of attorney (also known as a mandate in civil law Jurisdictions) or have a professional relationship, say, as lawyer and client. 2. General agents hold a more limited authority to conduct a series of transactions over a continuous period of time; and 3.
Special agents are authorized to conduct either only a single transaction or a specified series of transactions over a limited period of time. Law of Agency Property law is the area of law that governs the various forms of ownership and Nancy in real property (land as distinct from personal or movable possessions) and in personal property, within the common law legal system. Theory The word property, in everyday usage, refers to an object (or objects) owned by a person -? a car, a book, or a cellophane -? and the relationship the person has to it. In law, the concept acquires a more nuanced rendering.
Factors to consider include the nature of the object, the relationship between the person and the object, the relationship between a number of people in relation to the object, and how the object is regarded within the prevailing political system. Most broadly and concisely, property in the legal sense refers to the rights of people in or over certain objects or things. Early American theory James Wilson, U. S. Supreme Court Justice and professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania, in and , undertook a survey of the philosophical grounds of American property law.
He proceeds from two premises: “Every crime includes an injury: every injury includes a violation of a right. ” (Lectures, Ill, The government’s role in protecting property depends upon an idea of right. Wilson traces the history of property in his essay “On the History of Property. In his lecture, “Of the natural rights of individuals” (Lectures II, xii), he articulates related contemporary theory. Property rights and rights to people Property rights are rights over things enforceable against all other persons.
By Property rights may, however, arise from a contract; the two systems of rights overlap Property rights and personal rights Property rights are also distinguished from personal rights. Practically all contemporary societies acknowledge this basic ontological and ethical distinction. In the past, groups lacking political power have often been disqualified from the infinite of property. In an extreme form, this has meant that people have become “objects” of property-?legally “things” or chattels. (See slavery. More commonly, normalized groups have been denied legal rights to own property. These include Jews in England and married women in Western societies until the late the century. Transfer of property The most usual way of acquiring an interest in property is as the result of a consensual transaction with the previous owner, for example, a sale or a gift. Lease Historically, leases served many purposes, and the regulation varied according to intended purposes and the economic conditions of the time.
Leaseholds, for example, were mainly granted for agriculture until the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century, when the growth of cities made the leasehold an important form of landholding in urban areas. Bankruptcy is a legal status of an insolvent person or an organization, that is, one who cannot repay the debts they owe to creditors. In most Jurisdictions bankruptcy is imposed by a court order, often initiated by the debtor. History Main article: History of bankruptcy law In Ancient Greece, bankruptcy did not exist.
If a man owed and he could not pay, he and his wife, children or servants were forced into “debt slavery”, until the creditor recouped losses via their physical labor. Many city-states in ancient Greece limited debt slavery to a period of five years and debt slaves had protection of life and limb, which regular slaves did not enjoy. However, servants of the debtor could be retained beyond that deadline by the creditor and were often forced to serve their new lord for a lifetime, usually under significantly harsher conditions.
Fraud Bankruptcy fraud is a white-collar crime. While difficult to generalize across restrictions, common criminal acts under bankruptcy statutes typically involve concealment of assets, concealment or destruction of documents, conflicts of interest, fraudulent claims, false statements or declarations, and fee fixing or redistribution arrangements. Falsifications on bankruptcy forms often constitute perjury Bill of exchange A bill of exchange or “draft” is a written order by the drawer to the drawer to pay money to the payee.
A common type of bill of exchange is the cheese (check in American English), defined as a bill of exchange drawn on a banker and payable on demand. Bills of exchange are used primarily in international trade, and are written orders by one person to his bank to pay the bearer a specific sum on a specific date. Prior to the advent of paper currency, bills of exchange were a common means of Bill of exchange, Common Law Common law (also known as case law or precedent) is law developed by Judges through decisions of courts and similar tribunals rather than through legislative statutes or executive branch action.
A “common law system” is a legal system that gives great presidential weight to common law, on the principle that it is unfair to read similar facts differently on different occasions. The body of precedent is called “common law” and it binds future decisions. In cases where the parties disagree on what the law is, a common law court looks to past presidential decisions of relevant courts. If a similar dispute has been resolved in the past, the court is bound to follow the reasoning used in the prior decision (this principle is known as stare decides).
If, however, the court finds that the current dispute is fundamentally distinct from all previous cases (called a “matter of first impression”), Judges have the authority and duty to make law by creating precedent. Thereafter, the new decision becomes precedent, and will bind future courts. In practice, common law systems are considerably more complicated than the simplified system described above. The decisions of a court are binding only in a particular Jurisdiction, and even within a given Jurisdiction, some courts have more power than others.
For example, in most jurisdictions, decisions by appellate courts are binding on lower courts in the same jurisdiction and on future decisions of the same appellate court, but decisions of rower courts are only non-binding persuasive authority. Interactions between common law, constitutional law, statutory law and regulatory law also give rise to considerable complexity. However, stare decides, the principle that similar cases should be decided according to consistent principled rules so that they will reach similar results, lies at the heart of all common law systems.
A third of the world’s population (approximately . Billion people) live in common law Jurisdictions, particularly in England where it originated in the Middle Ages, and countries that race their legal heritage to England as former colonies of the British Empire, including India,the United States, Pakistan, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Canada, Malaysia, Ghana, Australia, Sir Lankan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Ireland, New Zealand, Jamaica, Trinidad ; Tobago, Cyprus, Barbados, South Africa, Zombie, Cameroon, Iambi, Botswana, Guyana and Israel use common law systems, or mixed systems with civil law.
Statutory Law Statutory law or statute law is written law (as opposed to oral or customary law) set down by a legislature (as opposed to regulatory law promulgated by the executive ranch or common law of the Judiciary in a typical democracy/republic) or by a legislator (in the case of an absolute monarchy). Statutes may originate with national, state legislatures or local municipalities. Statutes of lower Jurisdictions are subordinate to the law of higher. Codified law subject matter; in this narrower sense, some but not all statutes are considered “codified. The entire body of codified statute is referred to as a “code,” such as the United States Code, the Ohio Revised Code or the Code of Canon Law. The substantive provisions of the Act could be codified (arranged by subject matter) in en or more titles of the United States Code while the “effective date” provisions-? remaining unconfined-?would be available by reference to the United States Statutes at Large. Another meaning of “codified law” is a statute that takes the common law in a certain area of the law and puts it in statute or code form.
Private law (particular law) Another example of statutes that are not typically codified is a “private law” that may originate as a private bill, a law affecting only one person or a small group of persons. An example was divorce in Canada prior to the passage of the Divorce Act of . It was possible to obtain a legislative divorce in Canada by application to the Canadian Senate, which reviewed and investigated petitions for divorce, which would then be voted upon by the Senate and subsequently made into law.
In the United Kingdom Parliament, private bills were used in the nineteenth century to create corporations, grant monopolies and give individuals attention to be more fully considered by the parliament. The government may also seek to have a bill introduced unofficially by a backbencher so as not to create a public scandal; such bills may also be introduced y the loyal opposition -? members of the opposition party or parties. Sometimes a private member’s bill may also have private bill aspects, in such case the proposed legislation is called a hybrid bill. In Canon Law, private law is called “particular law. Administrative Law Administrative law is the body of law that governs the activities of administrative agencies of government. Government agency action can include relegating, adjudication, or the enforcement of a specific regulatory agenda. Administrative law is considered a branch of public law. As a body of law, administrative law deals with he decision-making of administrative units of government (for example, tribunals, boards or commissions) that are part of a national regulatory scheme in such areas as police law, international trade, manufacturing, the environment, taxation, broadcasting, immigration and transport.
Administrative law expanded greatly during the twentieth century, as legislative bodies worldwide created more government agencies to regulate the increasingly complex social, economic and political spheres of human interaction. Civil law countries often have specialized courts, administrative courts, that review these decisions. The plurality of administrative decisions contested in administrative courts are related to taxation. Citation need Companies Law Companies law (or the law of business associations) is the field of law concerning companies and other business organizations. This includes corporations, partnerships and other associations which usually carry on some form of economic or charitable activity. The most prominent kind of company, usually referred to as a “corporation”, is a “Juristic person”, I. E. It has separate legal personality, and those who invest money into the business have limited liability for any losses the company
