Premises Liability: Duty of Care, Negligence, and Reasonability

“Duty of Care”

Premises liability is a law which provides a standard in the duty of care of premises owners to their visitors. This is a legal doctrine which simply states that safety is owed by the owners to the people who visit their area, be it in their homes or in other places.

This principle of “duty of care” means that the owner must observe the following:

• He must avoid, as much as possible, inflicting direct harm to the person visiting his premises. If he does, then he is answerable for compensation to any damage which might result from the incident.
• He must do everything he can to remove the hazard within premises once he had known of its existence. Doing otherwise is interpreted already as negligence.
• He must try and make an effort to regularly check and collect information regarding his area of responsibility, be it through personal means or through other persons present in the household. If not, then negligence is already qualified as a stand for prosecution.

Negligence and Reasonability

An important aspect of premises liability laws is the principle of negligence.

Premises liability lawyers must indeed prove that negligence had occurred in the process of acquiring the injury. Negligence simply pertains to the action or inaction of an individual which typically caused the injury in its full extent.

Reasonability, on the other hand, is the ability of an individual to think adequately without any physical or psychological hindrance that provides him the ability to know the possibility of an accident to happen. If a person is not defined as “reasonable enough”, then he is usually exempt from liability.

Legal Avenues

If it is proven that negligence has occurred on the part of a sufficiently reasonable individual, or with reasonable people who could otherwise inform the one who is responsible of the hazard, then premises liability lawyers could take aggressive actions for justifiable compensation.