Risk, Duty and Foreseeability
The Restatement (Third) of Torts shrivels duty into an if-then statement executable by even obsolete jurists: if an actor's conduct creates a risk of physical harm then he owes a duty to exercise reasonable care.
Duty supposedly needed a new and simple algorithm because opinions turning on the question of duty were seen as incoherent and generally the result of a court having invaded the province of the fact finder (jury, hereafter). Foreseeability, the reporters decided, isn't the sort of legal or policy question judges decide - it's fact and case specific and thus something lay people relying upon common sense and communal norms of behavior ought to decide.
So that judges need not be completely replaced by computers the Restatement's reporters added that in exceptional cases a court may find that due to some other explicitly stated policy a defendant may not owe a duty. Furthermore, a court may on rare occasions properly find that reasonable people could not conclude that an outcome was foreseeable and so hold that the duty auto-generated by the new formulation had not been breached. Very simple indeed. But how's it working out?
If Nebraska (an early adopter of the Restatement's new duty formulation) is any indication the answer is "same results; different justification". Does a landlord who allows a renter to keep a pit bull owe a duty to a third party bitten by the dog? Sure; but it wasn't foreseeable so defendant wins. See Monica S. v. Nguyen. Does the owner of a road grader that can only be turned off while it's still in gear owe a duty to a mechanic called to fix it who twice accidentally bumps the ignition button causing it to start up and run over him? Sure; but it wasn't foreseeable so defendant wins. See Riggs v. Nickel..jpg)
What's going on? Look at the gold disk in my graphic. It contains all the acts, however remote, that created the risk of an injury that came to pass (e.g. the risk the road grader owner's great grandmother created by having his grandfather). American courts have pretty much uniformly taken the position that whatever risk the jury is to focus on should not be too remote. Whether because they recognized that "security is mostly a superstition" or that "a man sits as many risks as he runs" courts have in the past made essentially policy decisions to the effect that only a subset of all risks, those that aren't insubstantial, may be subjected to a foreseeability analysis. It's only for that subset of substantial risks that an actor assumes a duty and only for those risks that a jury may find to have been foreseeable that he can be made liable. Now in Nebraska (and Iowa) courts are finding a duty for every risk but then holding that whatever risks they would have formerly found to have been insubstantial are instead simply unforeseeable.
Rather than deciding the limits of tort liability those courts that have adopted the Third Restatement's concept of duty are instead engaged in the business of deciding the limits of human foresight. Hardly sensible and no improvement over the old rule: "you're under no duty to do the impossible i.e. guard against every 1-in-a-million risk you create". Oh well, at least it's frustrating what I suspect was the real purpose of the new duty formulation - to backdoor the Precautionary Principle into the law of torts.
