Word: plaintiff
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...fact, the hospital had a rather strong case. For, like all negligence plaintiffs, the Deutsches had the difficult job of proving four elusive claims: 1) that the defendant owed the plaintiff a duty of reasonable care; 2) that the defendant failed to perform that duty in the manner of "a reasonably prudent person" who would have foreseen and avoided the consequences; 3) that the defendant's negligence actually as well as legally caused the plaintiff's injury; 4) that the plaintiff suffered real loss or "damage" to be compensated by the defendant...
...plaintiff cannot win on mere possibilities. Nor can he rely on common-sense assumptions in situations where only experts are competent to judge causation. In the Deutsch case, for example, the jury was not permitted to assume that brain damage resulted from the repressed birth, and medical testimony was essential. All this makes the plaintiff's burden of proof exceedingly hard to carry when the effect appears long after the cause-for example, in radiation sickness or in lung cancer allegedly caused by cigarettes. Things get really complex when there may be two or more possibly equal causes. Example...
...relieve a plaintiff's intolerable burden of proof in some multiple-cause situations, the courts can hold all of the defendants liable. This may be true even if multiple acts are independent and harmless in themselves-for example, when several defendants deposit in a stream minor impurities that wind up polluting the whole stream. Another possible solution in such cases is to permit the defendants to fight it out among themselves as to what share of the damages each should...
...teen-age boy who then rendered a child paraplegic as the result of a drunken auto accident. When the child's guardian sued the druggist, he had to establish that the liquor sale was not too remote from the accident to constitute "proximate cause." Fortunately for the plaintiff, the Indiana Supreme Court agreed, choosing not to follow decisions in several other states that rejected such claims...
Common law imposes on every person a duty to exercise "ordinary care" for his or her own safety. Such care is defined as what "the great mass of mankind" would ordinarily exercise in the same or similar circumstances. And in most states, juries are normally instructed that a plaintiff who fails to take such precautions may not collect; the plaintiff's negligence means the defendant gets off scot-free, which seems to be just what happened in Milwaukee. Once the jury received its instructions, it absolved Budner and withheld all damages for Mrs. Busick...