How Does Strict Liability Apply in Premises Liability Law?

Premises liability is a legal concept that holds property owners or occupiers responsible for injuries that occur on their property due to unsafe or hazardous conditions. Examples of this are slips, trips, and falls.

These accounted for approximately 30% of reported injuries, a slight decrease from historical highs of 37%. What is strict liability in law? This applies when a property owner can be held responsible for injuries regardless of fault or intent, typically in situations involving dangerous conditions or activities. It is focused on the nature of the hazard itself, contrary to negligence-based claims. For instance, keeping wild animals, using explosives, or, in many jurisdictions, injuries caused by dangerous dogs. This legal principle ensures that victims can recover damages without proving negligence, making it a powerful tool in certain premises-related injury cases. Here’s what you need to understand about strict liability if you are filing for a potential claim.

The General Rule: Negligence in Premises Liability: It is reasonable for one to search where strict liability is applicable, but you must understand what strict liability is really not. Most premises liability lawsuits, including slip-and-fall, swimming pool, uneven step, and unsafe walkway cases, are resolved by negligence principles. The injured party must show that the landowner knew or should have known about the danger and failed to fix it. In this case, the property owner may be legally held responsible for the incident, says Gastonia premises liability lawyer D. Brad Collins. With inspection logs, repair records, or witness testimony, you can determine whether the hazard was ignored or reported. While a violation of the safety code is evidence of negligence or negligence per se in some jurisdictions, it does not transform a garden-variety premises case into a strict liability case. In a garden-variety negligence theory, fault must be shown, whereas strict liability needs no such showing.

Where Strict Liability Applies: Abnormally Dangerous Activities: Strict liability applies to situations where people perform activities that are considered extremely unsafe. The Restatement (Second) of Torts, §§ 519 and 520 provides this rule, which multiple legal systems have adopted. The person who conducts an abnormally dangerous activity will face liability for any damage that occurs to other people or their property or belongings because of the activity, regardless of their efforts to prevent such damage from happening.

The court considers certain facts before deeming an activity abnormally dangerous. These factors include a high risk of harm to others; a high likelihood of serious harm; the impossibility of reducing the risk with reasonable care; the activity's transferability to common use; its inappropriateness to the location; and the extent to which its dangers outweigh its benefits. Classic examples of such situations are explosive blasting and storing large amounts of flammable materials in residential areas, as well as handling various toxic or radioactive substances. These activities are so risky and hard to manage under common negligence that the person doing them should bear all harm, regardless of how well they do it.

The doctrine has its origins in the case of Rylands v. Fletcher in the English courts. This landowner was held liable when water was released from his reservoir and caused a flood in the neighboring mine. American courts based the development of the doctrine primarily on the framework of the Restatement, and its application varies from state to state.

Strict Liability for Wild and Domestic Animals: The legal system recognizes a separate category of strict liability, which exists as an independent standard because it applies to cases when people fail to control their animals. The determination of whether an animal falls into the wild or domestic category leads to different outcomes for these two established categories of strict liability. Individuals who keep lions, tigers, bears, or other inherently dangerous wild animals are held strictly accountable for injuries arising from the risks characteristic to wild animals. A certain kind of wild animal might have been captured, confined, domesticated, humored, pampered, or even treated, but it still bears its savage wildness to this day. The law accepts different situations as sufficient grounds to establish liability. Some states allow definite exceptions through pleading, which enables certain recovery options to decrease or vanish, while others can extend their reach. The ability to change exists in different geographical areas.

The legal framework concerning domestic animals exhibits extensive territorial boundaries. The common law system establishes that an animal owner faces liability when they had knowledge about their pet's dangerous behavior or should have known about it. Many states have enacted statutes, especially for dog bites, that necessitate strict liability for injuries occasioned by domestic animals, regardless of whether the owner had actual knowledge of the animal's dangerous tendencies. The one-bite rule or the strict liability doctrine prescribed by statute, depending on the state where the injury occurred, could be the applicable principle of operation.

The Attractive Nuisance Doctrine: Negligence, Not Strict Liability: The attractive nuisance doctrine applies to personal injury cases involving children who get injured on property that property owners perceive as dangerous yet attractive to children. Such is not the case. The doctrine requires property owners with dangerous but appealing conditions on their land to provide increased protection to child trespassers who visit their property under certain conditions. A landowner can be made liable under Restatement (Second) of Torts § 339 for a certain danger to trespassing children where the landowner knows or should have known that children were likely to come upon the property, the condition was likely to cause serious injury or death, and children would not appreciate the danger due to their age.

This standard is based on the concept of reasonable care or negligence. The comparison of this type of negligence-based claim helps to learn about the risk the owner must accept when he does not take any precautions to try to prevent the children from coming to the dangerous place.

Why the Distinction Between Strict Liability and Negligence Matters: The tort of strict liability exists as an actual tort that people believe to be more complex than its actual definition. The injured party's distinction between this principle and negligence highlights a significant difference. In strict liability, the owner’s responsibility for the accident needs to be proven. The assessment of harm shifts to the activity or animal as the source of injury when the activity involves dangerous elements or dangerous wildlife. The owner can defend a negligence action by showing reasonable precautions were taken, that the hazard was not foreseeable, or that the claimant either assumed the risk or contributed to the injury through his lack of care.

Comparative negligence usually forces the allocation of liability based on the relative degrees of contribution to harm, which is the trend in most American jurisdictions.

All property owners facing claims of either theory should best ensure a proper evaluation of which system of law actually governs the particular circumstances and obtain the appropriate legal advice. Strict liability in premises liability law is a narrow exception to the general rule of negligence. Abnormally dangerous activities on or in connection with the property or the keeping of wild animals most clearly fall within this exception. The attractive nuisance and common hazards on the premises fall under negligence law and therefore have to be approached for liability under negligence rules instead.