Law Commons^™

Foreseeability And Duty In Washington Negligence Law: Leaving The Road Less Traveled By, Leo Linder

Seattle University Law Review

Washington negligence law is a confusing labyrinth of foreseeability that not even Ariadne’s string could guide plaintiffs out of. Foreseeability is implicated in four distinct analyses, several of which overlap considerably. Doctrines that were once questions of law are now questions of fact, and vice versa. Something needs to change.

Washington has taken the novel approach of bifurcating the duty element into two parts—duty’s mere existence, which is a question of law for the court to determine; and duty’s scope, which is a question of fact handed off to the jury to determine. Foreseeability impacts both of these assessments, but …

Running On Empty: Ford V. Montana And The Folly Of Minimum Contacts, James P. George

Faculty Scholarship

Jurisdictional contests are in disarray. Criticisms date back to the issuance of International Shoe Co. v. Washington but the breakdown may be best illustrated in two recent Supreme Court opinions, the first rejecting California’s “sliding scale” that mixes general and specific contacts, the second using the discredited sliding scale to hold Ford amenable in states where accidents occurred.

California’s sliding scale is one variety of the contacts-relatedness tests, used in lower courts to have general contacts bolster weaker specific contacts. Some states—Montana and Minnesota for example—use the opposite extreme requiring a causal connection in defendant’s forum contacts, often using foreseeability …

How The Law Court Uses Duty To Limit The Scope Of Negligence Liability, Paul F. Macri

Maine Law Review

The element of duty is the least understood and most amorphous element of negligence. One reason that duty is not well understood is that duty analysis combines consideration of fact-specific issues of foreseeability of harm, relationship between the parties, and seriousness of injury with analysis of the public policy implications of finding a duty in the specific case, including the burden that will be placed on defendants by imposing a duty. This is a delicate balancing act for most courts. Over the last eleven years, the Maine Supreme Judicial Court, sitting as the Law Court, has employed duty analysis in …