Definition: Tort Liability is a legal duty to compensate someone for damages caused. It is the result of a court’s sentence where the wrongdoer has to pay for the injury committed against the victim.
What Does Tort Liability Mean?
These liabilities are commonly the result of a legal situation called civil wrong. A civil wrong is a contract breach created by damages caused to the property covered by the contract. Normally, a legal court is the responsible entity that will determine the merits of the claim and the size of the liability, in case that the damages are effectively demonstrated. As a result, the victim is entitled to a compensation big enough to restore the damaged property back to its initial status.
In business scenarios, a tort liability will be created if certain individual damages a company’s infrastructure or equipment. The harm caused by the person will have to be properly assessed to establish the size of the liability. On the other hand, unsafe job conditions can also create potential tort liabilities if an employee gets hurt by an insecure job environment. These are very sensible situations for companies since the legal aftermaths can be quite large.
Example
Mr. Lawrence has three big Labrador dogs in his backyard. They normally behave appropriately but recently the neighbor’s dog (a female one) is going into heat and this has caused the dogs to behave erratically. Yesterday, one of the Labradors chew off a big portion of his neighbor’s backdoor and this of course created a lot of other problems to the property owner.
In this case, a de facto tort liability is created, since there is no argument for Mr. Lawrence not to pay for the damages. His neighbor, nevertheless, also stated that the damages made to the door also allowed the dog to enter the house causing additional damages on the inside. After an appraisal of the damage was made, Mr. Lawrence had to compensate his neighbor for $2,400 worth of damages.
