Civil Liability

What is your monetary liability if your tree falls over your neighbours car? What happens if you employee lets a rock fall from the fifth floor and hits someone? What are you supposed to do if your dog bites a bystander?

Interesting questions that fall all under the branch of Civil Law called Civil Liability.

Let us start with the next idea: something that you did or failed to do hurt someone. That someone wants retribution for their damages. Should they sue you?

To see if you are responsible in any of the cases mentioned above, a judge will have to establish three basic points:

a) There is a damage.

Example, someone walks in winter and falls on the ice that wasn’t cleaned. The person who falls breaks his leg. The damage exists in this case.

b) There is a fault.

This means that it is you are to blame for something, such as negligence for not keeping on a leash your dog and so he was roaming freely in the street. 

Your dog may have bitten someone, but he didn't.  Then you have a fault but there is no damage so none can sue you.

But because you didn't dry your floor, a person fell in your store and broke his leg.  There is fault and there is damage in this case.

 This is tricky as fault may be caused by the victim herself or may be shared by many people, or even, there may be many different faults that should be discriminated separately.

c) The damage is directly caused by the fault

The victim should proof beyond reasonable doubt that there is a direct link between the fault and the damage suffered.

For example, with the person who fell on your wet floor, let us say he broke his leg and had to go to the hospital. In the hospital a doctor uses too much anaesthesia to perform a surgery on the knee and kills the person.

In this case, there are two separate faults. The fault for the slipping floor and broken leg and its compensation rests on the shoulders of the shop owner. The fault of the killing anaesthesia rests solely on the doctor who provided it. They cannot link the death to the shop owner.

This will be continued next week in an upcoming blog….