Please give a short, clear, and precise answer for each of the following questions by Sunday, May 12, 2013:

Anthony K. Moffett II

HUP 109 1438

L.A.G.C.C.

Spring Term 2013

 

1. Criminal law is the body of law that relates to crime. It regulates social conduct and proscribes threatening, harming, or otherwise endangering the health, safety, and moral welfare of people. Tort Law is a tort, in common law jurisdictions, is a civil wrong which unfairly causes someone else to suffer loss or harm resulting in legal liability for the person who commits the tortious act, called a tortfeasor. Although crimes may be torts, the cause of legal action is not necessarily a crime as the harm may be due to negligence which does not amount to criminal negligence.

 

2. Strict liability, sometimes called absolute liability, is the legal responsibility for damages, or injury, even if the person found strictly liable was not at fault or negligent. Strict liability has been applied to certain activities in tort, such as holding an employer absolutely liable for the torts of her employees, but today it is most commonly associated with defectively manufactured products. In addition, for reasons of public policy, certain activities may be conducted only if the person conducting them is willing to insure others against the harm that results from the risks the activities create.

 

3. Causality (also referred to as causation) is the relation between an event (the cause) and a second event (the effect), where the second event is understood as a consequence of the first. In common usage, causality is also the relation between a set of factors (causes) and a phenomenon (the effect). Anything that affects an effect is a factor of that effect. A direct factor is a factor that affects an effect directly, that is, without any intervening factors. (Intervening factors are sometimes called "intermediate factors".) The connection between a cause(s) and an effect in this way can also be referred to as a causal nexus.

4. A body of rights, obligations, and remedies that is applied by courts in civil proceedings to provide relief for persons who have suffered harm from the wrongful acts of others. The person who sustains injury or suffers pecuniary damage as the result of tortious conduct is known as the plaintiff, and the person who is responsible for inflicting the injury and incurs liability for the damage is known as the defendant or tortfeasor.

Three elements must be established in every tort action. First, the plaintiff must establish that the defendant was under a legal duty to act in a particular fashion. Second, the plaintiff must demonstrate that the defendant breached this duty by failing to conform his or her behavior accordingly. Third, the plaintiff must prove that he suffered injury or loss as a direct result of the defendant's breach.

5. Justices Brennan, Marshall, Blackmun, and Stevens dissented. The dissenting opinion argued that the case did not pass the Lemon test. The secular display surrounding their secular purpose of celebrating of a national holiday could have been done without a clearly religious symbol that supports only one religion to the exclusion of others giving one group public approval of their views. Even if other religious groups are allowed to include “‘competing efforts [by religious groups] to gain or maintain the support of government’ may ‘occasion considerable civil strife’” The religious crèche is also placed in a central location within the display, which makes even less of the Court’s idea that Pawtucket was just including all of the traditional images.

6. The three-judge dissent, written by Judge Andrews and joined by Judges Frederick Crane and John F. O'Brien, by contrast, saw the case as a matter of proximate cause—Palsgraf's injury could be immediately traced to the wrong committed by the guard, and the fact of the wrong and the fact of the injury should be enough to find negligence (unlike duty, proximate cause is a matter of fact to be determined by a jury; therefore, the dissent would have upheld the jury's verdict for the plaintiff).

The dissent took note of recent expansions in New York state tort law, that allowed children to sue for the wrongful death of a parent, and spouses for loss of consortium, arguing that these expansions were based on the fact of injury beyond the foreseen injury of the deceased, and on the needs of public policy. "What we do mean by the word 'proximate' is that because of convenience, of public policy, of a rough sense of justice, the law arbitrarily declines to trace a series of events beyond a certain point. This is not logic. It is practical politics." Palsgraf v. Long Island R.R. Co. (1928).