Famous Tort Law Cases That Made History

All You Need to Know About Tort Law

Tort law, simply put, is a branch of law that deals with civil wrongs committed by one party against another. It provides remedies to individuals who have been harmed by the wrongful acts of others. A "tort" refers to the wrongful act committed by the plaintiff against the defendant.
There are three different types of torts: negligence, intentional, and strict liability. Negligence is the failure to exercise reasonable care which results in harm to another person. The most commonly familiar negligence cases are car accidents in which one driver is held responsible for the other’s injuries and/or damages. Intentional torts are when there is an intention to do harm or injury , such as assault, battery, and false imprisonment. Lastly, strict liability is when an individual makes a product that causes harm to another, such as airbags failing to deploy during a crash intended to keep a passenger safe.
The purpose of tort law is to provide individuals who were injured or suffered damages as a result of the negligent actions of a third party with a venue to receive compensation for the harm done to them. Tort law provides the vehicle by which these individual can sue for damages in a civil court.

Milestone Case: Donoghue v Stevenson

One of the landmark cases in the field of tort law is commonly known as Donoghue v. Stevenson, a case between plaintiff May Donoghue and David Stevenson, an owner of a ginger beer manufacturing company. In 1932, in the United Kingdom, Mrs. Donoghue became ill with gastroenteritis after drinking a ginger beer containing a decomposed snail slug. She purchased the ginger ale at a local café, where the café owner informed the manager of the ginger ale manufacturer, Mr. Stevenson, who subsequently visited the café and agreed to exchange it for a new bottle. Promptly after having the contents of the bottle tested, Mrs. Donoghue’s attorney filed the claim. During the trial, there was never any doubt that the manufacturer had included a decomposing matter in the product, but there were two key questions at issue: The decision of the court was that Mrs. Donoghue did not have to prove that she bought the ginger beer herself, and also that the manufacturer owed the plaintiff a duty of care. The court established that the manufacturer was in fact liable to the plaintiff because the plaintiff was by, in effect, nearly poisoning herself because of the defendant’s negligence in ensuring the quality control. The case set a very important precedent: it engrained the concept of duty of care into the fabric of tort law. This concept is an objective standard of what a normal person would "reasonably do." By establishing the duty of care, the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom determined that the "owner" of the ginger beer had a duty of care towards Mrs. Donoghue, even though legally she was not his customer. Although the case created an objective test of what a reasonable person would do in any situation, it did not define who a reasonable person is. The courts, however, illustrated how the reasonable person acts with caution and care by applying the test in future case law.

Famous Case: Palsgraf v Long Island Railroad Co

The most often taught pain-and-suffering case in the common-law world is Palsgraf v Long Island Railroad Co., 248 NY 339 (N.Y. 1928). It was a case were there was not liability, even though it was an unfortunate and needless result of negligence.
In Palsgraf the plaintiff was near the center of a train station platform when a woman carrying a package was getting off a train and was about to be hit by a train. In what amounted to an instinctive acts, a railroad employee tried to push her out of the way. The act caused her to drop her package which contained fireworks, which exploded when they hit the ground. The explosion knocked over a sign that struck the plaintiff.
Defendant argued that the intervening act of the bomb (the bundle being dropped) was an independent cause, breaking the chain of causation. The Court however explained that the act of dropping the bundle was not the proximate cause of the injury, because it was not foreseeable that the dropping of the bundle would harm the plaintiff.
There are two critical takeaways from the case. First is that foreseeability is an important element of proximate cause. Second is that what is foreseeable is a question of law for the courts (as opposed to a question for the jury).
No prosecuting attorney in New York probably gets through a tort class for first-year law students without reviewing this case.

Landmark Case: Liebeck v McDonalds

Widely known as a 1994 lawsuit between 79-year-old Stella Liebeck and the fast-food giant McDonald’s, Liebeck v McDonald’s sparked a nationwide debate about frivolous lawsuits. Sometimes referred to as the "hot coffee case," the facts behind the claim were a little more complex than initially reported. In August of 1992, at the encouragement of her grandson, Mrs. Liebeck ordered a cup of coffee at a drive-through at the McDonald’s restaurant in Albuquerque. While parked in the restaurant lot, she spilled the coffee on her lap, suffering third-degree burns over 16 percent of her body. Ms. Liebeck was diagnosed with a "skillet" burn, which is sustained if a hot fluid contacts the skin and the person moves very little. After filing a claim, Mrs. Liebeck allegedly offered to settle with the restaurant for only $20,000 to cover medical expenses and to remove her from the list of potential litigants in cases involving those types of injuries. McDonald’s refused. The subsequent trial revealed that the fast-food chain had been aware of the risk and had received hundreds of burn injury claims stemming from its hot coffee at drive-throughs. A jury awarded her $160,000 to cover her medical expenses, and imposed a punitive damages amount equal to 2 days worth of coffee sales at McDonald’s (2.9 million cups) or about $2.9 million. Upon appeal, the punitive damage award was reduced to 3 percent of the original ruling, or $480,000. The case became widely known in the media and polarized the legal community, with many viewing the case as the epitome of a frivolous lawsuit while others believed the high punitive damages were justified. Regardless of one’s opinion regarding the merits of the case, subsequent research confirmed that Mrs. Liebeck was not the only person to have spilled hot coffee on her lap. The fact that McDonald’s had received hundreds of claims indicating a dangerous pattern made it more likely that a jury would be willing to consider higher punitive damages. The case stands today as a stark reminder that the facts are never what they seem, and that information can be manipulated to serve anyone’s purpose.

Historic Case: Rylands v Fletcher

Moving into the industrial revolution, the case of Rylands v Fletcher [1868] was a private nuisance dispute where a mill owner dug a 100 yard long, 10 foot deep pit to build a reservoir to hold the water running under his property. When the reservoir was completed, the mill owner did not stop up his old mine shafts so that the water flowed down causing flooding in the adjacent coal mine. The claimant sought reparations, and the defendant ultimately lost. This case had a huge impact on the future of tort law because it helped set the concept of strict liability as we know it today. Ordinarily , if A harms B, A could be found liable for the harm they caused, but that would be difficult in these cases because the harm was not caused by human intervention but rather by an act of nature. This is the same for environmental and industrial torts like those seen in Erin Brockovich and A Civil Action, where industries polluted the water and soil because of negligence. Any harm that comes to individuals in these cases only serves to remind tort lawyers how complex they must be when dealing with industrial cases.

New Era in Tort Law: Privacy Cases

In recent years, courts have begun applying long-abandoned legal theories in the area of privacy protection. Most notably, the tort of invasion of privacy has been invoked with increasing frequency, with landmark rulings by the California Court of Appeal and the Washington Supreme Court in the field of invasion of privacy cases. In Hernandez v. Hillsides, Inc., 211 Cal.App.4th 1498 (Cal.App.2d Dist., 2015), the Second District of the Court of Appeal affirmed a $550,000 award to a former employee who’d been the target of illegal surveillance by her colleagues. That court approved a verdict for intrusion upon seclusion (one of the four categories of prima facie case for invasion of privacy) and invasion of privacy after the evidence showed that the employee had been targeted solely because she was a witness in an action and, even when she was in a different area of the office, she was spied on and photographed by defendant employees. A federal claim under the wiretap act also was authorized, and the plaintiffs were awarded punitive damages for violation of the wiretap act. One of the critical aspects of the Hernandes case was the fact that the employer had rebuttably ratified the tortious conduct of its employees by not preventing or punishing that conduct. Thus, the employer could be liable for the actions of its employees.
Washington Supreme Court Ruling Almost simultaneously, the Washington Supreme Court issued its ruling in Yoder v. Wash. Elec. Coop., 347 P.3d 743 (Wash. 2015), which confirmed the jury’s finding of liability for invasion of privacy as well as awarding punitive damages against one of the employees at the electrical co-op and the employer for the employee’s unlawful surveillance of a customer’s yard and home using a camera system. Although the verdict initially resulted in an award of $ 24 million, this was ultimately reduced to $4.5 million. The lower court found that the defendant and its employee violated the right to privacy of one of the co-op’s members through the use of a video surveillance camera. At trial, the court concluded that the co-op created a rebuttable presumption of privacy in its members’ homes based on the nature of its operations, and that each of the co-op’s members could have participated in decisions about the surveillance policy. The employee was found liable for intrusion upon seclusion, infliction of emotional distress by outrage, and for theft of electricity. Punitive damages were awarded against the individual defendant and the employer for his actions.

Key Cases: Tort Law in a Digital Age

Despite our increased interconnectedness brought on by the digital age, and the efficiency that typically comes along with all those connected devices, it has been countered by an equally exponential rise in tort disputes. Tort law has reached new digital heights as the courts and the internet have taken their first steps together.
Cases involving cyber torts—torts resulting from cyber-related conduct—spiked after the boom of free to browse social media platforms. The most infamous cyber tort legal battle was by far the case of Yahoo! Inc. v. Hingston, which saw its first appearance in the US Court for the Northern District of California in 2010. Hingston initiated the suit against Yahoo!, seeking monetary damages for alleged acts of defamation and libel. According to Hingston, Yahoo! permitted pornographers to upload the plaintiff’s photograph, which was then associated with the names Jack Ueberroth and Wong Ueberroth in "I Have Sex with the Ueberroth Brothers" groups. And that was all Hingston could say definitively.
The plaintiff’s claims for damages suffered due to the "false light" had three primary bases: (1) that a reasonable person would find the group’s statements offensive; (2) that there were false facts disseminated by Yahoo! that placed the plaintiff in a false light; and (3) that the group’s defamatory remarks about plaintiff were maliciously false. The federal trial court found that Hingston did not prove the first claim and all but dismissed the second two claims out of hand because it found it completely implausible that any reasonable person would associate Yahoo! with Hingston’s photo—which is really where the title of this case derives from, "Yahoo! Inc. v. Hingston." Yahoo! was later dropped from the suit entirely for lack of jurisdiction.
Hingston’s fate is not the only one illustrating the significant impact the internet has had on tort law. In 2009, the Supreme Court of Iowa heard arguments for a defamation case against an Iowa-based website, and subsequently found the website’s publisher did not qualify as a "public figure" and was therefore not entitled to a special level of protection under the First Amendment. The case in question actually involved a social networking website (think MySpace, before the lawsuit Facebook), which had acted as the host for some anonymous defamers. However, since the published statements were not made by the website’s publisher, but by other network users, the publisher was not found responsible for the remarks, which were later found to be false.
As the internet records and relays more and more information, the burden of defamation suits will increasingly fall on website publishers and internet service providers.

Conclusion: The Constant Development of Tort Law

Upon review of these five notorious cases, examples of tortious conduct and the accompanying damages may seem obvious. However, it is important to understand that such examples were not always so clear at issue. The law of torts is constantly evolving and developing in response to the needs of society and evolving technology. These development are not merely academic, as they continue to impact the day-to-day practice of law. The law now recognizes the need for justice for victims of negligence. Already facing a difficult burden in proving damages, courts faced with landmark cases routinely make revisions to existing law or create new law to meet evolving standards for determining damages . For example, in some states (including Texas), the wrongful death of a child or elderly person was once an issue of economic loss only with non-economic damages being recoverable solely for mental anguish. As time has passed, the law has developed to the point that even in Texas, tortious conduct resulting in the death of a child or elderly person is now clearly recognized to create a presumption of economic damages. The evolution of tort law remains tied to the needs of society. To the extent that new developments for medical technology, consumer products, trucking regulations, product warnings, and so forth can be shown to potentially create a risk of tortious harm, tort law will develop to protect against that risk.