Contributory Negligence

[rcannon100]

QUOTE

“A doctrine of common law that if a person’s own negligence contributes to causing an accident in which that person is injured, the injured party can’t collect any damages (money) from another party who caused the accident. Because this doctrine often ended in unfair results (where a person only slightly negligent was prohibited from recovering damages from a person who was much more so), most states now use a comparative negligence test instead, in which the relative percentages of negligence by each person are used to determine how much the injured person recovers.”

[mstone]

It doesn’t really affect my behavior, but it does scare me. I blame CN for contributing to the culture that concludes that nobody is ever responsible for a collision on the roads. And that culture has brought us to a place where you can kill someone with a car and the only investigation is whether you did it sober.

[PotomacCyclist]

Changing the contributory negligence standard would be a positive thing. I hope the proposal is successful. The metro DC area is one of the few areas in the U.S. that still follows the strict contributory negligence standard. DC, VA and MD all follow it. Only a couple other states do so.

Other states follow a comparative negligence standard, where the fault is assigned to the parties and damages are awarded. In some states, if one party is more than 50 percent at fault, then no damages are awarded. I think that’s reasonable. I’d like to see something like that in this area.

[cvcalhoun]

Even knowing what the doctrine of contributory negligence is, I’m not sure how it would change my behavior. My primary reasons for avoiding negligence are a) to keep myself as safe as possible, and b) to ensure I don’t injure anyone else. Those provide enough motivation, without regard to what the financial consequences would be if I were to fail at those goals.

I suspect that the legal doctrines have more of an effect when we’re talking about a large corporation that is comparing the potential financial rewards of doing something versus the financial penalties if that action goes wrong. The classic example is Domino’s decision to eliminate its “30 minutes or its free” guarantee, after being sued a couple of times on the theory that its drivers had acted unsafely in order to try to meet the deadline. Presumably, Domino’s would be less likely to be sued if every victim knew that a finding of even 1% negligence would completely eliminate any right of recovery.

[Terpfan]

It’s contributed to me thinking of buying and wearing a go-pro type camera. It’s not hard to prove some form of contributory negligence if it’s your word against their words. In MD’s case, the state’s high court (Court of Appeals) upheld it just last year. What I don’t understand is why it’s held on so long in this immediate area (DC-MD-VA) whereas nearly all of the rest of the country has moved toward comparative negligence. I should add that my suspicion is because of a strong insurance lobby with the various jurisdiction’s legislatures.

[Steve O]

The reason contributory negligence is so important to us cyclists is that if we are found to be even 1% at fault for a crash we can be denied any damages.

For instance, the law states that bicycles must be equipped with a red rear reflector and white front light when being ridden at night. It is possible that even if you have blinkies galore, if you do not have a reflector on the back and you are crashed into by a texting driver, a clever lawyer may be able to prove that you “contributed” to the crash (not being in compliance with the law) and are therefore not entitled to anything.

Contributory negligence is bad bad bad for cyclists (and pedestrians). Any efforts to get these laws updated is long overdue.

Here’s a post I found about a case in N. Carolina, which also has contributory negligence laws.
http://www.bikelaw.com/2013/11/12/take-that-contributory-negligence/

[lordofthemark]

@cvcalhoun 91402 wrote:

Even knowing what the doctrine of contributory negligence is, I’m not sure how it would change my behavior. My primary reasons for avoiding negligence are a) to keep myself as safe as possible, and b) to ensure I don’t injure anyone else. Those provide enough motivation, without regard to what the financial consequences would be if I were to fail at those goals.

Yes, but there are certainly situations where there are things we as cyclists might do that we know to be perfectly safe, but that are technically illegal in the jurisdiction in which we reside, and would very likely be seen by a jury of non-cyclists as contributing to an accident – an accident that in reality was entirely the motorist’s fault. That is one reason (probably more important to me than the optics argumenr) that I tend to avoid doing certain such technically illegal things, even though I am strongly persuaded they are not unsafe. So in that sense it does impact my behavior.

It also makes me more wary of biking on routes I beleive to be accident prone anyway, because while I would generally avoid such places for safety, the absense of compensation (if I was deemed negligent despite being lawful) would make it worse.

[Author]

Posts