In
tort law, a
duty of care is a
legal obligation imposed on an individual requiring that they adhere to a
standard of
reasonable care while performing any acts that could foreseeably harm others. It is the first element that must be established to proceed with an action in
negligence. The plaintiff must
be able to articulate a duty of care imposed by law which the defendant has breached. In turn, breaching a duty may subject an individual to liability in tort. The duty of care may be imposed
by operation of law between individuals with no
current direct relationship (familial or contractual or otherwise), but eventually become related in some manner, as defined by common law (meaning
case law).
Duty of care may be considered a formalization of the social contract, the implicit responsibilities held by individuals towards others within society. It is not a requirement that a duty of care be defined by law, though it will often develop through the jurisprudence of common law.
At common law, duties were formerly limited to those with whom one was in privity one way or another, as exemplified by cases like Winterbottom v. Wright (1842). In the early 20th century, judges began to recognize that the cold realities of the Second Industrial Revolution (in which end users were frequently several parties removed from the original manufacturer) implied that enforcing the privity requirement against hapless consumers had harsh results in many product liability cases. The idea of a general duty of care that runs to all who could be foreseeably affected by one's conduct (accompanied by the demolishing of the privity barrier) first appeared in the landmark U.S. case of MacPherson v. Buick Motor Co. (1916) and was imported into UK law by another landmark case, Donoghue v Stevenson [1932]. Both MacPherson and Donoghue were product liability cases.
Although the duty of care is easiest to understand in contexts like simple blunt trauma, it is important to understand that a duty can be still found in situations where plaintiffs and defendants may be separated by vast distances of space and time.
