Torts Commons^™

The Article presents a comprehensive proposal for assigning liability in tort cases according to the parties’ respective degrees of fault. The authors criticize the Court of Appeals of Maryland’s recent decision in Coleman v. Soccer Association of Columbia declining to abrogate contributory negligence, particularly the court’s notion that it should not act because of the legislature’s repeated failure to do so. The Article provides a comprehensive analysis of the advantages and disadvantages of comparative fault, including its effect on administrative costs, claims frequency, claims severity, insurance premiums, and economic performance. The authors propose the legislative enactment of comparative fault and …

Almost immediately after negligence emerged as a distinct tort in the early nineteenth century, the defense of contributory negligence began to develop in conjunction with it. The contributory negligence rule is that when a plaintiff's negligence contributes to the occurrence of an accident, the plaintiff cannot recover damages from a defendant who negligently injures him. Thus, even a slightly negligent plaintiff could not recover from a negligent defendant if the plaintiff's negligence proximately caused his own injury. The contributory negligence rule originated in the English case of Butterfield v. Forrester and was eventually adopted by all fifty states and the …