The first thing to know about liability in car wreck cases is knowing what to call them, because the right language sets the proper tone for the jury.<\/p>\n
In 2014, New York City joined San Francisco and several other major municipalities in replacing \u201caccident\u201d with \u201ccrash\u201d<\/a> when discussing vehicle collisions. After all, the reasoning goes, planes Absturz<\/em>, ships sink<\/em>, and trains wreck<\/em>, so cars should Absturz<\/em>. Advocates, such as National Highway Traffic Safety Administration head Mark Rosekind, believe that calling these incidents \u201caccident\u201d implies that the crash was an unavoidable act that was entirely unpreventable, and in most cases, that is not true. Other organizations, including the state of Nevada and the Associated Press, have made similar moves. Not everyone agrees. Some people point out that \u201caccidental\u201d is also synonymous with \u201cunintentional,\u201d and all negligence events, including car crashes, are unintentional by definition.<\/p>\n Early 1900s factory owners were some of the first people to use \u201caccident\u201d in this context, calling workplace injuries \u201cindustrial accidents\u201d to shift blame away from their dangerous facilities and onto supposedly careless workers.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Legal responsibility is the first element in a negligence case. Most drivers have a duty of angemessene Pflege<\/a>, a principle first articulated by Lord James Atkin in Donoghue v. Stevenson<\/em>. The case involved a woman who sued a bottler for negligence after she found a dead snail in the bottom of her beer bottle. Lord Atkin responded with what came to be called the neighbor principle. \u201cYou must take reasonable care to avoid acts or omissions which you can reasonably foresee would be likely to injure your neighbour,\u201d he wrote, adding that neighbors are \u201cpersons who are so closely and directly affected by my act that I ought reasonably to have them in contemplation as being so affected.\u201d<\/p>\n According to this definition, in car crash cases, anyone else on or near the road is a motorists\u2019 neighbor.<\/p>\n In most states, truck drivers, Uber drivers, taxi drivers, and other commercial operators have a higher duty of care as common carriers. But in 1998, a New York court abolished<\/a> this distinction in the Empire State, even though a higher duty had been the law for about a century and a half. Instead, according to the court in Bethel v. NYC Transit Authority<\/em>, a \u201cmore universal standard of reasonable care under all of the circumstances of the particular case\u201d now applies to both commercial and noncommercial drivers.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Simply stated, a breach of the duty of reasonable care is any act or omission that abnormally increases the risk for a car crash.<\/p>\n In many of these cases, the Fahrl\u00e4ssigkeit an sich<\/em><\/a> rule applies; negligence an sich<\/em> basically means \u201cnegligence as a matter of law.\u201d In New York, the tortfeasor (negligent driver) is automatically liable for damages if the tortfeasor violated a safety statute and that violation proximately caused the victim\u2019s injury.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Cause has both factual and legal elements.<\/p>\n Factual causation is sometimes called \u201cbut-for causation<\/a>.\u201d For example, if a tortfeasor ignored a red light and hit another car in the intersection, the crash would not have occurred \u201cbut for\u201d the tortfeasor\u2019s negligence. Like breach, factual causation is an issue for the jury to decide.<\/p>\n On the other hand, legal causation, or foreseeability<\/a>, is usually a legal issue. Essentially, there must be a direct connection between the breach and the damages. In one famous case, a railroad company was held not liable for damages after a passenger dropped a package of fireworks; the explosion created a shockwave that knocked a large scale onto a victim on the other side of the platform. However, it is foreseeable that if Driver A hits Driver B, the impact may force Driver B\u2019s vehicle into a pedestrian, thus causing serious injury.<\/p>\n Courts sometimes use a broader zone of danger test to determine foreseeability. For example, if a child is injured in a car crash and the parents were in the car as well, the parents may be eligible for damages even if they were not physically injured.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n In most cases, monetary compensation is the only available remedy in negligence cases. This compensation includes money for medical bills, lost wages, property damage, and other economic losses.<\/p>\nPflicht<\/h3>\n
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