There are two types of laws in our country: common law and legislative law.
Legislative law is simple. It is what we think about that is written down after the legislature votes on it and the governor of a state or the president accept it and sign it in to law. The second type of law is called common law. This is the law that is created when the courts or judges make a decision that is not absolutely clear in the written law. It resolves the grey area. Once a judge makes a decision on how to interpret something in the legislative law, it becomes the way the same situation will be decied next time it comes up, unless a higher court over rules the decision. When the Supreme Court of the United State makes a decision, it becomes the law in the entire country and every court is required to follow it. That is, of course, until the legislature decided to make a new law to overrule the court. That is how we check and balance the powers in the government.
When injury lawyers talk about negligence, they're talking about somebody acting with ordinary care or failing to act with ordinary care. Negligence is the lack of ordinary care - it's as simple as that. Negligence may arise from doing an act that a reasonably prudent person would not have done under the same circumstances or on the other hand, from failing to do an act that a reasonably prudent person would have done under the same circumstances to cut through all of it. If somebody does something stupid and it results in somebody else being hurt, they're responsible for it.
Negligence requires both a reasonable foreseeable danger of injury to another and conduct that is unreasonable in proportion to that danger. A person is only responsible for the results of his or her conduct if the risk of injury is reasonably foreseeable. Importantly, the exact occurrence or exact injury does not have to be foreseeable, but injury as a result of negligent conduct must not merely be possible but probable.
As an example, if a parent gives a, a teen driver the keys to a car that, uh, that driver doesn't have their full license and they're still have a permit, a learner's permit, and the learner's permit requires that driver to only drive with licensed drivers. But, the parent says, no, no, no, it's okay - you have your permit - go ahead. That action creates foreseeability for anything that the teen inexperienced driver may do. So now if the teen inexperienced driver is driving down the road and has a passenger in the car and leaves the roadway and strikes a tree. It is foreseeable that an individual who doesn't have the experience of a licensed driver may do that. It's not necessary to say to the parents, well, you didn't foresee specifically that your teen driver was going to drive off and hit this specific tree. The law doesn't require that the law simply requires general foreseeability that somebody may be harmed by the activities that you do. And in that scenario, the parents would be equally responsible for giving the keys to their inexperienced teen driver.
This is just the beginning of the legal concept of Negligence. In this lesson, I give you a simplified version of how the concept of negligence works in the most basic form.
