Comparative and Contributory Negligence

What do comparative and contributory negligence mean?

Accidents happen daily where people are injured. After an accident, people wonder: "Who was at fault?" The legal concepts of contributory and comparative negligence provide a way to allocate fault between parties. As the terms imply, a party may contribute to an act of negligence or be comparatively negligent for his or her own injuries.

Negligence in Accident or Injury Claims

Negligence is a term used to describe conduct that creates an unreasonable risk of harm to others. If you are negligent, and your negligence causes another person to become injured, then you are legally responsible for paying damages. For an injured person, called the plaintiff, to win a negligence claim, that person will have to prove:

  1. The defendant owed a duty toward the plaintiff by demonstrating reasonable care for other people's safety;

  2. The defendant failed to act reasonably, or breached his duty;

  3. The defendant's breach was the actual cause of another person's injuries;

  4. The defendant's breach was the proximate cause of the injuries, meaning that the defendant should have known that the breach would cause injury;

  5. The plaintiff suffered injuries for which he or she may claim damages.

Contributory Negligence

The term of contributory negligence is used to describe conduct that creates an unreasonable risk to one's own self. This focused on the idea is that an individual has a duty to act as a reasonable person. When a person does not act this way and injury occurs, that person may be held entirely or partially responsible for the resulting injury, even though another party was also involved in the accident.

For example, when a motorist runs into a pedestrian who was crossing the street without carefully checking traffic or heeding the warning of the do-not-cross sign, contributory negligence comes into play.

After a plaintiff files a negligence claim, the person being sued, called the defendant, can assert a contributory negligence claim against the plaintiff, stating that the injury happened at least partially due to the plaintiff's own actions. This is called a contributory negligence counterclaim.

If the defendant is able to prove the contributory negligence claim, the plaintiff may be prevented from recovering damages, or the damages may be reduced. In the example, the pedestrian would probably would be considered at least partially at fault for carelessly crossing the road.

Comparative Negligence

Most states have now taken a comparative negligence approach to contributory negligence, by which each party's negligence for an injury is weighed when determining damages.

In the past, the courts viewed contributory negligence as a total bar to the recovery of any damages. Under this view, if a person had contributed to the accident in any way, the person was not entitled to any compensation for the injuries. But now, most states have adopted a comparative negligence approach.

Comparative and contributory negligence are factors in any settlement or trial related to various personal injury cases. For claims in Virginia, click the links below to learn more about comparative and contributory negligence as they relate to:

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