Robert Cormier
import 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).