In civil proceedings it is often the case that misfortune happens, causing wrong to the victim who consequently sues for a redress of the costs incurred. Typically, the wrong happens due to certain wrongful actions of the other party, who acts as the defendant in the case. Therefore, one of the main objectives of a rightful justice rendering is to determine the right defendant who should be liable for the wrongs caused to the victim.
When shifting the costs from the victim to the respondent, then in one case the damages may be ascribed to a whole social group or community; in another case, particular individuals may be held responsible for indemnifying the losses; still, in another case, there could appear both of the aforementioned defendants. The controversial and disputable situations which ensue from a certain confusion and ambiguity in choosing the right defendant often present a stumbling block for a successful course of the case. Consequently, there arises a burning issue in the legal practice concerning the questions of who should bear the responsibility for causing the harm, what kind of responsibility should be imposed on the guilty party and which laws should be used as guidelines for deciding on the liable person, the type of liability and the resulting judgment of the court.
The present paper considers the case which clearly illustrates the difficulties concerning the choice of the defendant who would take on the duty to repair the wrongful losses. While being on vacation, a man decides to take part in a trail ride through a desert. The ride is sponsored and advertised by the posh resort which accommodates the holiday-makers, and the initial impression created by that kind of travel is that of calm and peaceful observation of the local landscape. It especially suits the man in question as he has had no previous experience with horses — the information which he readily shares with the guides, Ted and Rex, in order to secure a tranquil ride for himself. However, driven by their rollicking temper, the guides decide to play a joke on the novice and give him a self-willed mare which throws him down on the ground without any prior notice and runs off, back to her stables.
Such careless treatment of the inexperienced rider results in his several bones being broken and a concussion caused by the fall, which constitutes bodily harm and creates the grounds for starting a legal procedure against the party at fault. However, one should bear in mind that despite the obvious and direct complicity of the two guides in the accident, there are two other possible defendants which could be subject to a judgment against them and bear the costs defrayed by the victim, and those are: the stable that employed the guides and the fashionable resort which advertised and attracted clients to the trail ride service. The aim would now be to make an attempt at defining the level of guilt of those parties and the corresponding level of their responsibility for the accident.
As the case in point concerns mostly private parties, the concepts and ideas of tort law appear to be most applicable here. Following the characteristics of tort law discussed by Coleman (2003), it can be assumed that this branch of civil law best suits the given case due to the fact that tort law considers
“The question whether the costs are to be borne by victims or some other particular person or persons. Tort law is one of the institutions political communities develop in order to allow victims the opportunity to shift the costs that befall them to others”.
Generally, a tort is a civil wrong that is legally recognized as a ground for court proceedings. The main objective of tort law, in contrast to criminal law, is not actually to punish the culprit, but mostly and primarily to relieve the victim of the damages incurred and to create a preventive environment that would help to avoid the same wrongs in the future. While tort law is based on the notion of a wrong — “the violation of a duty not to harm or not to impose risks of a certain kind on others” (Coleman, 2003) — it is necessary to bear in mind that not all wrongs are actually punishable. For the case to be reviewed under tort law, not only should a wrong be committed and the victim suffers, but the duty of care to the victim should also be violated by the defendant. Therefore, it is of foremost importance to establish whether the defendant was primarily responsible for not harming the others or not, and correspondingly, whether or not the defendant should be held liable for the misfortune.
In this connection, another two important notions of tort law — fault and strict liability — come to the fore. The difference between them can be explained as the relationship between wrongdoing as such and the actual harm caused by that wrongdoing. While fault liability presupposes the actual harm directly resulting from the defendant’s actions which cannot be justified or excused, strict liability covers the cases when, despite a certain breach of the duty, the person found strictly liable has not intentionally and consciously undertaken any faulty actions (Coleman, 2003). Thus, strict liability applies in practice mostly to the cases of manufactured goods, or harm caused by domesticated animals, which should be controlled by their owners supposedly aware of the consequences of their pets’ behavior.
When blending the aforementioned characteristics of tort law into the framework of the given case, it becomes obvious that the defendants fall under the two liability categories. The guides, who intentionally gave the wrong horse to the man, are the ones to bear fault liability due to the fact that the result of their actions was clearly predictable and nevertheless the two of them were consciously breaching their duty to safeguard the trip-makers and ensure they receive proper horses fitting their riding experience. Thus, both of the guides should definitely be accountable for the mishap: even if the idea to play a trick originally occurred to one of them, the other should also be held responsible for failing to prevent the accident. In addition, the resort and the stables can be viewed as strictly liable for the situation in so far as the former conducts an extensive promotion campaign of the trail rides and thus should be responsible for the services it encourages, and the latter is presumably entitled to hire both guides and horses for providing services to the customers. Keeping a self-willed horse that constitutes a potential danger to the clients can be considered as negligence on behalf of the stables, thus shifting part of the blame to them.
Despite the possibility of imposing the guilt on several litigants of the case, there is an information gap that hampers in the due decision as to which of the defendants should be blamed most of all. For instance, it is unknown what share the resort has in the business, whether it is a joint enterprise with the stables and whether it is legally obliged to conduct quality control of the trail ride service. Only by knowing such details can a more righteous judgment be passed.
With this in mind, the review of the given case study in terms of tort law suggests an idea that distribution of liability for a tort is in fact grounded on certain moral standards and prerequisites which, in the case of multiple defendants, help to define the level of participation of each of them in the wrongdoing and distribute their liability correspondingly. Taking into account one of the main objectives of tort law — preventing the wrongs — it would be reasonable to assume that the more defendants are punished for the wrongdoing, the less the chance of such wrongdoing recurring in the future is.
References
Coleman, J. (2003). Theories of Tort Law. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Web.