Intentional Torts Overview

Intentional Torts

• Assault: Liability arises if someone intends to create an imminent fear of harmful or offensive contact, and that fear is realized.
• Battery: Liability found if someone intends harmful or offensive contact, and that contact occurs, directly or indirectly.
• False Imprisonment: Liability attaches when someone intends to confine another within fixed boundaries, and that confinement occurs without legal justification, and the other person is aware of the confinement.
• Methods: Physical barriers, force, duress, threats.
• Intentional Infliction of Emotional Distress (IIED): Liability exists if someone intentionally or recklessly causes severe emotional distress to another, and the conduct must be extreme, outrageous, severe, and causally related to the distress.
• Trespass to Land: Liability occurs if someone intentionally enters another's land, causes something or someone to do so, remains on the land, or fails to remove something from the land.
• Trespass to Chattels: Liability imposed when someone without consent or privilege interferes with another's personal property causing impairment (condition, quality, value) or significant loss of use. Intent, interference, causation are required elements.
• Conversion: Liability arises when someone intentionally interferes with another's right to possess personal property, and the interference is significant enough to require paying the full value of the item.
• Forms of Interference: Wrongful acquisition, transfer, detention, substantial alteration, severe damage, misuse.

Privileges

• Consent: "Volenti non fit injuria" – no injury to the willing party.
• Expressed Consent: Direct, positive, unequivocal agreement.
• Implied Consent: Inferred by conduct, action, or inaction.
• By Law: Emergencies where a reasonable person would find contact necessary.
• Medical: In emergencies, if a serious harm risk exists if treatment delays, and reasonable person would consent. No implied consent if the treatment is not required!
• Mistake/Misrepresentation/Duress: Invalid consent if under such influence.
• Intoxication: Consent may be ineffective if the person is incapable of rational will.
• Criminal Conduct: No tort recovery for injuries in consensual criminal acts. No defense for defendant.
• Informed Consent: Surgeons must disclose treatment risks; failure can result in liability.
• Self-Defense: Use of reasonable force to defend against immediate harmful or offensive contact. No retaliation.
• Defense of Others: Similar elements to self-defense, with varying court interpretations regarding "reasonable belief."
• Defense of Property: Reasonable force allowed to defend property or chattel from harm, dispossession, or meddling. No lethal force.
• Recovery of Property: Use of reasonable force to recover wrongly taken property if: immediate right to possession, fresh pursuit, and reasonable circumstances. Shopkeepers can detain suspected criminals with reasonable belief and investigation.
• Public Necessity: Privilege to enter another's land to avert an imminent public disaster.
• Private Necessity: Privilege to enter another's land to prevent serious harm to oneself, property, or another.
• Discipline: Reasonable force permissible for parents or legal guardians to control children.

Negligence

• Negligence: Failure to conform conduct to a required standard, breaching a legal duty to exercise reasonable care to prevent harm to someone.
• Learned Hand Rule: Weighing burden of precaution against potential harm. (Formula incomplete)

This quiz covers the key concepts of intentional torts, including assault, battery, false imprisonment, and intentional infliction of emotional distress. You'll understand the definitions, liabilities, and methods related to these legal principles. Test your knowledge on how these torts are established in law.