The legal system applies the concept of strict liability to certain personal injury cases. Its application alters the list of elements required for establishing a proof of negligence.
According to the strict liability concept, there is no need to prove that the defendant violated a standard of care.
The person claimed responsible for a given accident could be held liable for any resulting damages, regardless of whether or not the same person had been found at-fault.
How does strict liability change the concept of contributory or comparative negligence?
A plaintiff cannot be excused for negligent conduct, if it contributed in some way to creation of, or aggravation of the plaintiff’s injury. Consumers that have been injured by a defective product lack the ability to win a personal injury claim, if any of those same consumers have altered or used the defective item.
Under what circumstances might a personal injury lawyer elect to charge a defendant with strict liability?
When the defendant has carried out a dangerous action, and, thus, has injured the plaintiff, as per injury lawyer in in Medicine Hat.
Examples of such dangerous actions
• Unsupervised use of fireworks
• Poor control of a canine that has a tendency to bite people
• Landlord ignores tenant’s complaints about a loose guardrail on a staircase; eventually, someone suffers a fall, when the same guardrail collapses.
• An owner of beach property tries to keep that space private. He constructs a pit on the beach, as a trap for trespassers.
• Two teens decide to race their cars on a section of road that is still under construction.
• Shipping a bottle of acid.
• Arranging for a group of drug users to share the same needle.
If a consumer had filed a charge of product liability, the legal system would elect to apply the concept of strict liability. If the case were to go to court, the judge would assume that the manufacturer had violated the basic standard of care, the one that applied to product liability claims.
While the plaintiff would not have to prove the defendant’s failure to follow the established standard of care, the same plaintiff would have to produce proof of an injury. That proof could normally come from the observations in a doctor’s report.
Plaintiffs that cannot show proof of an injury would have their claim denied. The courts would not want to waste time hearing testimony for a defective product liability claim, if the plaintiff could not prove that the defective item had injured him or her.
Often, plaintiffs fail to prove the required injury’s existence. Sometimes, consumers think that because a given product’s defects almost caused an injury, the maker of that defective item can be sued. That is not true.