Minnesota Law
Minnesota Personal Injury Defense Law: General
Personal Injury Defense Law: General
Tort Law Generally
Degree of Fault
Each of the three kinds of torts -- negligence, intentional misconduct, and strict liability -- has its own degree of fault (not to be confused with the burden of proof, discussed below) that a plaintiff must show in order to collect from a defendant. Proving that someone else was negligent hinges on the following question: Was the party who allegedly caused the injury behaving at least as carefully as a reasonable person would have behaved under the same circumstances? If not, then that party was negligent and has committed the tort of negligence. Examples of negligence include an automobile accident caused by a reckless driver, or a customer falling and being hurt at a store because a store owner did not repair a defective door or an unsafe escalator. If a reasonable person would have driven more prudently, or if a reasonable store owner would have repaired the defective door or unsafe escalator, then the negligent party could be found liable by a judge or jury. Product liability cases often allege negligence. For example, a plaintiff might allege that a reasonable automotive engineer would have known that a particular type of steering system would cause a driver to lose control of a car and thus should have taken steps to redesign the steering system.
The outcome of lawsuits alleging negligence can be difficult to predict because guessing how much care a reasonable person would have exercised in the same situation is difficult. The reasonable person standard is vague, imprecise, and apt to be interpreted differently by different people. Often, a practice that seemed reasonable in the past may appear unreasonable with the benefit of hindsight. Finding an attorney who has experience with how juries typically interpret the reasonable person standard is therefore one of the most important steps in successfully defending a personal injury lawsuit alleging that a person acted unreasonably. .
Intentional misconduct occurs when someone does something to deliberately hurt another person or damage another person's property. For example, if a manufacturer deliberately sells products it knows to be defective, it is causing harm on purpose. A plaintiff alleging intentional misconduct need not compare the defendant's actions to those of a reasonable person; he or she need only show that the defendant intended his or her actions. In a civil lawsuit alleging intentional misconduct, a plaintiff can recover punitive damages in addition to awards for injuries, pain, and suffering. Punitive damages, designed to punish people or organizations for unlawful acts, are often very large sums of money. Until recently, there were few limits on the amount of money a jury could award as punitive damages. However, federal and state legislatures have recently passed laws putting caps on punitive damage awards in certain types of cases, and judges have long had the authority to reduce many types of punitive damage awards. Still, it is to the plaintiff's advantage to convince a jury that his or her injuries were the result of intentional misconduct rather than negligence.
The final theory of tort liability, strict liability, applies only to very dangerous situations. If someone does something extremely dangerous, such as demolish a building, and someone gets hurt as a result, the injured person can sue for damages without having to prove the defendant acted negligently or with intent to cause harm. The principle behind strict liability lawsuits is that some activities are so dangerous that, in exchange for permission to engage in the activity, the actor must assume total responsibility for any results.
Burden of Proof
The burden of proof in a tort case, as in most civil law cases, is lower than the proof required in criminal law cases. In a criminal case, the state must prove a person's guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. To win a personal injury lawsuit based on tort law, the plaintiff need only demonstrate that a majority of the evidence shows that an injury was caused by the defendant's tortious actions. The different burdens of proof mean that a company might be acquitted of criminal charges stemming from its actions and still be found liable in a civil lawsuit stemming from the same actions.
Comparative Fault
Tort law attempts to compensate victims if their injury is caused by another person. When one person clearly causes all of another person's injury, blame is easy to place. In many other cases, however, the victim's actions help cause the injury or make it worse than it would otherwise be. For instance, a negligent driver might injure a pedestrian who is negligently walking in the street, instead of on a sidewalk where a prudent pedestrian normally walks. A prudent person might be slightly injured when using a defective chain saw, whereas a less prudent person might incur more severe injuries by negligently failing to wear safety goggles while using the chain saw. In these cases, a judge or jury must calculate how much each party is at fault. Each state has its own rules for calculating damages that can be recovered when a victim is at least partially to blame for his or her own injury.
Minnesota has a comparative fault rule. Under the comparative fault rule, a judge reduces the amount of any damage award by the percent that the victim's own actions contributed to his or her injuries. For example, if a jury finds that a plaintiff suffered $100,000 in damages, but was 30 percent at fault, the judge reduces the damage award by 30 percent, to $70,000. In Minnesota, the reduction is only up to 50 percent. If the victim is more than 50 percent at fault, he or she collects nothing.
Vicarious Liability
There are several ways that a business can be held liable for the actions of its employees. All are known as vicarious liability. For example, a company might be held responsible for damage caused by an employee if the company knows that the employee is likely to injure someone and negligently fails to exercise adequate control over the employee. The owner of a vehicle can be held responsible for accidents caused when another person drives the vehicle if the owner negligently entrusts the vehicle to the other driver. Generally however, a business owner is not responsible for acts committed by independent contractors.
The most common form of vicarious liability is known by the Latin term, respondeat superior Under respondeat superior, an employer is responsible for torts committed by employees within the scope of their employment. For example, if a pedestrian is struck and injured by a person driving to a party, the victim has a claim against the driver. However, if the pedestrian is hit by a person driving a delivery van for his or her employer, then respondeat superior allows the pedestrian to bring claims against both the driver and the employer.
Frequently, personal injury plaintiffs cannot recover anything from the employee because he or she has no money. Because employers usually have more money or better insurance, plaintiffs often focus their recovery efforts on the employers. An employer may have a cause of action against the employee who exposed the company to liability, but such actions are rarely pursued either because the employee has no money or the employer assumes that to do so would create ill will among remaining employees.
Premises Liability
Premises liability is an area of tort law that governs the duties owed by landowners to persons on their property. Generally speaking, a landowner is liable for anyone injured on the landowner's property and a jury can award damages to the injured person. However, a landowner may not be liable if he or she had no way of knowing about a hazard that caused an accident. No one is responsible if an accident was truly unavoidable, and, as described above, a plaintiff cannot recover from someone unless the plaintiff can prove fault (strict liability is the only exception to this principle). In general, a landowner is not liable for injuries to a trespasser, although a landowner must take reasonable care to protect persons who are likely to approach a property for legitimate purposes, such as letter carriers or delivery persons. Anyone, even a trespasser, can sue a landowner if he or she is injured by an unjustified hazard on the property, such as a trap designed intentionally to injure people.
Under a theory known as "attractive nuisance" a landowner can be liable for injuries to small children if the landlord fails to take preventative action to avoid injuries to children he or she should have known would come onto the property. A swimming pool is a classic example of an attractive nuisance. An apartment complex that maintains a private outdoor swimming pool is obligated to take measures designed to keep out trespassers, such as erecting a fence or having a lifeguard present, because the law assumes that the owner of a pool should know that children will be attracted to a pool despite warning signs.
If someone is injured on public land adjacent to a landlord's property, the landlord generally is not legally liable unless he or she did something to cause the injury, such as hitting a passerby with the falling branches of a tree being cut down on the landowner's property.
Business owners can always be sued if their own carelessness or negligence causes others to be injured. Historically this meant landowners were not liable for the actions of third parties they did not control. Today, however, business owners can sometimes be liable for injuries caused by third parties committing crimes on their property. An increasing number of crime victims are winning lawsuits filed against business owners who did not, in a jury's opinion, take appropriate measures to ensure the safety of their customers. This type of lawsuit extends the landowner's duty to foresee, and take steps to prevent, possible illegal activity on his or her property. An example of this type of case is one in which a person who is attacked in a parking lot sues the lot's owner for failing to provide security measures that might have prevented the attack.
Whether a lawsuit based on premises liability will succeed largely depends on a jury's opinion of whether a reasonable business owner would have foreseen the probability of the crime occurring. For example, if tenants of an apartment building complain several times to their landlord that their security system is not working, and burglars later burglarize several apartments, the tenants might have grounds for a successful lawsuit against their landlord alleging negligence in failing to fix the security system.
Product Liability
Kinds of Defects
Product liability lawsuits typically allege one or more of three kinds of defects -- defective warning, design defect, and manufacturing defect. Often, a single lawsuit will allege all three theories.
Defective Warning
A manufacturer has a duty to provide adequate instructions concerning the safe use of its product and must warn buyers of any dangers associated with the product. If such warnings are not present, the manufacturer may be liable for injuries caused by the product. Manufacturers therefore have a duty to perform safety tests to determine what warning labels need to be put on a product. These tests should simulate conditions under which the product would ordinarily be used. For example, the manufacturer of a hand-held electric hair dryer must anticipate that its product might be used above a sink full of water and therefore must warn buyers that dropping the product in water may lead to electrocution. However, a warning label need not be put on an obviously dangerous product, such as a kitchen knife.Included in the duty to warn is a duty to provide post sale information. Under Minnesota law, manufacturers must warn consumers of hazards associated with a product discovered after a product has been sold. A manufacturer may also be required to recall products in which defects have been discovered and to redesign the products to make them safe. In Minnesota, these are continual obligations of manufacturers. In other words, a manufacturer must warn consumers about, and possibly recall, an unsafe product, even if the manufacturer stopped making it many years ago.
Design Defect
Sometimes products are built exactly as designed, but are dangerous because of poor engineering, inadequate testing or poor choice of construction materials. A manufacturer is negligent if it fails to take reasonable care to ensure that a product is designed to perform safely. Not only must companies make sure their products are safe when they are used in the intended way, but also in unintended, though foreseeable, ways. If a manufacturer cannot eliminate a danger from a product, or install a guard to protect a user from the danger, then the manufacturer must warn the user of the danger. Most product liability cases attempt to prove that a design defect caused an injury.
Manufacturing Defect
This type of defect occurs when a product is designed well, but through a flaw in the manufacturing process, fails to meet the specifications contained in the design. For example, even if a motorcycle manufacturer ordinarily makes a well-designed gasoline tank for its motorcycles, if it makes a leaking one that causes a fire, then the manufacturer could be liable for injuries caused by that defect.
Types of Product Liability Claims
Most often, product liability lawsuits are brought under one or more of three theories -- strict liability, negligence, and wrongful death. Knowing which theory a plaintiff is pursuing in a particular case is important because each theory applies different standards and has a different statute of limitations.
Strict Liability
Strict liability holds a manufacturer liable for injuries sustained by a person using its product, if the product is found to be unreasonably dangerous. Under Minnesota law, a plaintiff pursuing a claim for strict liability must prove that a product was defective and unreasonably dangerous, that the defect was present while the product was still in the manufacturer's control, and that the defect was the cause of the injury. The statute of limitations in Minnesota for product liability lawsuits based on strict liability is four years from the date of the injury.
Negligence
Product liability lawsuits can allege negligence when a manufacturer fails to exercise the care that would be exercised by a reasonable manufacturer in the same or similar situation. Whereas strict liability focuses on the manufactured product, negligence theory focuses on the conduct of the manufacturer. A manufacturer who implements very strict production controls designed to ensure that products are made properly may be able to avoid committing a negligence tort because all due care was taken that reasonably could be expected.Minnesota, like some other states, has laws that under certain conditions allow a plaintiff to collect damages from companies that distribute or sell defective products, even if the company did not design, test, or manufacture the product. If distributors or sellers knew that a product was defective but did nothing to keep it from reaching consumers, they could be held liable for damages. In addition, a distributor who damages a product can be held liable for any injuries this causes, and a retailer who incorrectly assembles or installs a product can also be sued. The statute of limitations in Minnesota for product liability lawsuits based on negligence is six years from the date of the injury.
Wrongful Death
A wrongful death lawsuit is usually a lawsuit filed by the surviving relatives of a person killed by a defective product. Although a wrongful death lawsuit can be filed in other types of personal injury cases such as automobile accidents, it is most often associated with product liability cases. Under Minnesota law, any dependent heirs such as sons or daughters of a person killed by a defective product can sue the manufacturer for that person's future income that was lost when he or she died. Surviving relatives cannot, however, sue a manufacturer to collect damages for the pain and suffering of a person wrongfully killed by a manufacturer's defective product. However, the estate of the dead person can sue to collect money needed to pay any bills for medical treatment received by the person before he or she died.A person who files a wrongful death lawsuit after the death of a spouse can sue for damages to recover for loss of companionship, affection, and sexual relations. Minnesota also has a fetal protection law that allows wrongful death lawsuits to be filed if a manufacturer's defective product (or a car accident) causes the death of a viable fetus, that is, one that would be capable of surviving outside the mother's womb.
Dram Shop Laws
The only defense specifically permitted by the Act is that the business establishment reasonably and in good faith relied upon proof of age offered by the person who subsequently became intoxicated. The law states that the only proofs of age sufficient for a business owner to rely upon this defense are:
- A valid driver's license or identification card issued by any state or Canadian province
- A valid military identification card issued by the United States Department of Defense
- In the case of a foreign national (from any nation other than Canada), a valid passport
Resources
James T. O'Reilly and Nancy C. Cody, The Products Liability Resource Manual: An Attorney's Guide to Analyzing Issues, Developing Strategies, and Winning Cases (American Bar Association, General Practice Section, Chicago, IL, 1993).