Robert Cormier
Oct 05, 2013 5:31 AMimport duty. See nCTY (4).
duty. (Be) 1. A legal obligation that is owed or due to
another and that needs to be satisfied; an obligation for
which somebody else has a corresponding right.
"There is a duty if the court says there is a duty; the law, like
the Constitution, is what we make it. Duty is only a word
with which we state our conclusion that there is or is not to
be liability: it necessarily begs the essential question ....
[M)any factors interplay: the hand of history, our ideas of
morals and justice, the convenience of administration of
the rule, and our social ideas as to where loss should fall."
William L. Prosser, Paisgraf Revisited, 52 Mich. L. Rev. 1,
15 (1953).
"A classic English definition [of duty] from the late nineteenth
century holds that, when circumstances place one
individual in such a position with regard to another that
thinking persons of ordinary sense would recognize the
danger of injury to the other if ordinary skill and care were
not used, a duty arises to use ordinary skill and care to
avoid the injury. A much quoted American judicial defi�
nition of duty emphasizes its relational aspects, with a
focus on the foreseeability of risk to those 'Within the
range of apprehension.' At about the same time, one of
the most creative of American law teachers defined duty as
a complex of factors, including administrative, economic,
and moral ones, to be applied by judges in their analyses
of the legal strength of personal injury cases." Marshall S.
Shapo, The Duty to Actxi-xii (1977).
"While courts frequently say that establishing 'duty' is
the first prerequisite in an individual tort case, courts
commonly go on to say that there is a 'general duty' to
'exercise reasonable care,' to avoid subjecting others to
'an unreasonable risk of harm,' or to comply with the
'legal standard of reasonable conduct.' Though cast in
the language of duty, these formulations merely give the
expression to the point that negligence is the standard of
liability." Restatement (Third) of Torts � 6 cmt. a (Discussion
Draft 1999).
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