Negligence is the spine of your entire Torts course, and it is the single most tested doctrine on a 1L Torts exam. If you can move cleanly through its four elements — in order, without skipping the one that feels automatic — you will out-write most of your class. This is the framework you'll return to on nearly every fact pattern involving a car accident, a slip-and-fall, a doctor, a bad guardrail, or a train station.

Negligence has four elements a plaintiff must prove to win: (1) the defendant owed the plaintiff a duty of care, (2) the defendant breached that duty by failing to act reasonably, (3) the breach was both the actual ("but-for") and proximate cause of the plaintiff's harm, and (4) the plaintiff suffered actual damages. If any one element fails, the entire claim fails. The whole doctrine is a chain — and a chain breaks at its weakest link. Your job on an exam is to test every link.

What are the four elements of negligence?

Every negligence claim is built on the same four-part rule. Memorize the order — it is the order you will write your exam answer in:

1. Duty — Did the defendant owe the plaintiff a legal obligation to act with a certain level of care?
2. Breach — Did the defendant fail to meet that standard of care?
3. Causation — Did the breach actually and proximately cause the harm? (This is two questions.)
4. Damages — Did the plaintiff suffer legally cognizable harm?

Some professors and casebooks phrase these as five elements by splitting causation into "actual cause" and "proximate cause." That's the same doctrine — know which convention your professor uses, because your issue headings should match it. Substantively, nothing changes: you still analyze both kinds of causation.

Element 1: Duty — did the defendant owe a legal obligation?

Duty is the question of whether the law obligates this defendant to protect this plaintiff at all. The general rule is that everyone owes a duty of reasonable care to those who could foreseeably be harmed by their conduct. This is the default: if you're doing something that could hurt people, you have to be careful.

Two competing views of duty run through the classic cases, and both come from Palsgraf v. Long Island Railroad (N.Y. 1928):

• The Cardozo (majority) view — Duty is owed only to plaintiffs within the foreseeable zone of danger. If the plaintiff was not a foreseeable victim, no duty existed and the analysis stops. This is the dominant approach.
• The Andrews (dissent) view — A defendant who acts negligently owes a duty to everyone; the foreseeability question belongs to proximate cause, not duty.

Duty gets complicated in a few recurring situations you must flag:

• No duty to rescue / affirmative acts. The common law imposes no general duty to affirmatively help a stranger in peril. Exceptions arise from special relationships (innkeeper–guest, employer–employee, common carrier–passenger), from creating the peril, or from voluntarily undertaking a rescue and then abandoning it.
• Special relationships create heightened or affirmative duties.
• Landowner duties traditionally varied by the plaintiff's status — trespasser, licensee, or invitee — though many jurisdictions now apply a unified reasonableness standard.

Exam move: Duty is often the element students skip because it "obviously" exists. Don't. In an easy case, dispose of it in one sentence ("A driver owes a duty of reasonable care to other motorists"). But when the facts involve a nonrescue, a special relationship, an unforeseeable plaintiff, or a landowner, duty is the whole ballgame — and the professor buried the points there.

Element 2: Breach — did the defendant fall below the standard of care?

Once a duty exists, breach asks whether the defendant's conduct fell below the required standard. The standard is objective: the reasonable person under the circumstances. The defendant's honest belief that they were being careful is irrelevant — we ask what a reasonable person would have done.

Two frameworks dominate the breach analysis:

The reasonable person standard

The reasonable person is a legal fiction — a person of ordinary prudence. Key refinements:

• Physical disabilities are taken into account (a blind person is held to the standard of a reasonable blind person), but mental deficiencies generally are not.
• Professionals (doctors, lawyers, accountants) are held to the standard of a reasonable member of their profession — malpractice.
• Children are generally held to the standard of a reasonable child of like age, intelligence, and experience — unless the child engages in an inherently dangerous adult activity, in which case the adult standard applies.

The Hand Formula (a cost-benefit test)

From Judge Learned Hand in United States v. Carroll Towing Co. (2d Cir. 1947): a defendant breaches if the burden of taking a precaution (B) is less than the probability of harm (P) multiplied by the gravity of the loss (L) — that is, breach when B < P × L. If the cheap precaution would have prevented a likely, serious harm, failing to take it is unreasonable.

Two shortcuts to breach also appear on exams:

• Negligence per se. When a defendant violates a statute designed to protect a class of persons from a type of harm, and the plaintiff is in that class and suffered that harm, the violation establishes breach (and often duty) automatically. Watch for a broken safety statute in the facts.
• Res ipsa loquitur ("the thing speaks for itself"). Where the harm is the kind that ordinarily doesn't happen absent negligence, the instrumentality was in the defendant's exclusive control, and the plaintiff didn't contribute to it, the jury may infer breach even without direct proof. Classic fact pattern: a barrel of flour falls out of a warehouse window (Byrne v. Boadle).

Element 3: Causation — did the breach cause the harm?

Causation is where most exam points live, and it is two questions. Analyze both, separately, with their own mini-headings.

Actual cause (cause-in-fact)

The default test is the but-for test: but for the defendant's breach, would the plaintiff have been harmed? If the harm would have happened anyway, there is no actual cause. Two special situations override the but-for test:

• Substantial factor test — used when multiple causes each independently would have caused the harm (e.g., two fires merge and burn the house; each alone would have destroyed it). But-for fails because either cause "passes," so courts ask whether the defendant's conduct was a substantial factor.
• Alternative liability / burden-shifting — when two or more defendants act negligently but only one caused the harm and the plaintiff can't prove which, the burden shifts to the defendants (Summers v. Tice: two hunters, one bullet).

Proximate cause (legal cause)

Proximate cause is a policy limit: even if the defendant factually caused the harm, was the harm a foreseeable result of the breach, or too remote to fairly hold the defendant responsible? The dominant test is foreseeability / the scope of the risk that made the conduct negligent in the first place.

The recurring proximate-cause issue is the intervening/superseding cause: something happened after the defendant's act that contributed to the harm. A foreseeable intervening cause (a rescuer getting hurt, ordinary medical malpractice treating the original injury) does not cut off liability. An unforeseeable, superseding cause (a bizarre, independent act) does break the chain and relieve the defendant.

Don't forget the eggshell-skull (thin-skull) plaintiff rule: the defendant takes the plaintiff as they find them. If a foreseeable type of harm occurs, the defendant is liable for the full extent of the injury even if the plaintiff's fragility made it far worse than expected.

Element 4: Damages — did the plaintiff suffer actual harm?

Negligence requires actual, cognizable harm — physical injury to person or property, and the economic and pain-and-suffering damages that flow from it. This is the element that most cleanly distinguishes negligence from intentional torts: for a battery you can recover nominal damages just for the invasion, but there is no negligence without damages. A near-miss with no injury is not actionable negligence, no matter how careless the defendant was.

Pure emotional distress and pure economic loss (with no accompanying physical harm) are heavily limited and governed by their own special rules — flag them but don't assume ordinary damages doctrine applies.

Worked example: putting all four elements together

Suppose Driver texts while driving, runs a red light, and strikes Pedestrian in a crosswalk, breaking Pedestrian's leg. Walk the chain:

• Duty — Driver owes a duty of reasonable care to foreseeable users of the road, including pedestrians in crosswalks. Easy; one sentence.
• Breach — Texting and running a red light falls below the reasonable-person standard. If a statute prohibits texting while driving, argue negligence per se. Under the Hand Formula, the burden of not texting (near zero) is far less than the probability and gravity of a collision.
• Causation — Actual: but for Driver's inattention and running the light, Pedestrian would not have been hit. Proximate: hitting a pedestrian is exactly the foreseeable risk that makes running a red light negligent — squarely within the scope of the risk.
• Damages — A broken leg is actual physical harm; medical bills, lost wages, and pain and suffering are recoverable.

Now add a wrinkle to test yourself: what if Pedestrian had a rare bone disease that turned the fracture into a lifelong disability? Eggshell-skull rule — Driver is liable for the full extent. What if a paramedic negligently botched the treatment? Ordinary medical malpractice following an injury is a foreseeable intervening cause; it doesn't cut off Driver's liability.

The exam trap: don't collapse the elements

The number-one mistake 1Ls make is treating negligence as one blob of "the defendant was careless." The points are hidden in the seams between elements. Specific traps to avoid:

• Skipping duty when the facts involve a nonrescue, a special relationship, or an unforeseeable Palsgraf plaintiff — that's where the professor put the issue.
• Conflating breach and causation. "He was speeding, so he's liable" skips causation. Prove the speeding was the but-for and proximate cause of this harm.
• Analyzing only one kind of causation. Always do both actual and proximate cause, with separate headings.
• Forgetting damages exist as an element. If the facts describe a near-miss, the negligence claim fails for lack of harm — and saying so earns points.
• Ignoring defenses. A complete answer moves to comparative/contributory negligence, assumption of risk, and any immunities after establishing the prima facie case.

How the elements connect to defenses and related doctrines

Once the plaintiff establishes all four elements (the prima facie case), the defendant can still win or reduce liability. Know how the affirmative defenses attach:

• Comparative negligence reduces the plaintiff's recovery by their share of fault (pure vs. modified matters — know your jurisdiction).
• Contributory negligence, in the few jurisdictions that retain it, can bar recovery entirely.
• Assumption of risk (express or implied) can bar or reduce recovery when the plaintiff knowingly accepted the danger.

Negligence also sits next to strict liability (abnormally dangerous activities, defective products) — where fault isn't required — and intentional torts — where damages aren't. Being able to say why a claim is negligence rather than one of those neighbors is itself an exam skill.