Negligence Whilst Shit-Faced

Factual Questions
1

Good Morning Dopers.

insert standard not-seeking legal advice and vow to talk to a real lawyer stuff here

I am interested in finding out your opinions of typical case-law regarding the implications of inebriation in defining negligent acts. More specifically, does an incident that would otherwise be considered accidental become negligent when one is drunk? Obviously situations where the very act of drinking whilst in inappropriate situations (i.e. going to work drunk or of course making the decision to drive drunk) is in itself negligent are relatively clear, but what about inebriation in innocent circumstances that leads to an accident? Does the fact that you are drunk (either tipsy or shit-faced) automatically make the action negligent.

A few hypothetical cases:

Example 1.

I spend an evening at home playing a drining-game with roommates. The pizza-delivery guy comes to the door and when I go to take the pizza I, in my drunken stupor, accidentally trip and knock him down the stairs. Clearly if I was sober, this would not be an act of negligence. But because I was drunk, could/would I typically be considered negligent and perhaps liable on that basis?

Example 2.

I decide to see if I can finish 26 onces of Vodka in under 26 minutes. Shortly thereafter, I turn on the stove to fry some food. Unfortunately I pass-out due to the alcohol before I manage to make my dinner, resulting in a fire. Once again, I don’t think falling asleep with the stove on is negligent in and of itself, but does the fact that I was drunk make it so?

Many Thanks.

insert reminder that I assume that YANAL , unless otherwise stated

2

The standard of care required of defendants for the purposes of the law of negligence is that of the ordinary prudent person (“the man on the Clapham omnibus”). Not the ordinary prudent drunk. Generally, a drunk will be held to the standard of a sober person. This must be so, otherwise every drunk driver who hits a pedestrian could escape liability.

In your case 1, you are wrong to assume that “clearly”, if sober, an “accidental” slip would render you not liable. Much depends on the detail of any case, which would be litigated to an excruciating level of analysis. But you should bear in mind that “accidental” does not mean “unintentional”. If you slipped because, although sober, you didn’t take sufficient care, then you might well be liable.

One significance of intoxication is that it will, in a practical sense, make it harder for you to demonstrate that the slip was not negligent (issues about the onus of proof aside). Any whining by you that the slip wasn’t your fault is likely to be met with “Yeah right”, and roll-eyes.

Similar considerations apply to your second example. Falling asleep with the oven on does not strike me as a promising defence case if you were sued in negligence for the resulting fire. An ordinary prudent person maintains appropriate supervision of dangerous things like stoves with food cooking in them.

3

Pun intended?

4

Noel, I think you’ve missed the main point of the OP. While I agree that the OP makes some poor assumptions about negligence (going to sleep with the oven on quite likely COULD be found negligent, for example), the main question in the OP can be restated as:

If I do something drunk that, when done sober wouldn’t be negligent, will the fact I was drunk when I did it make it negligent?

The answer to which would be:

It depends. :smiley:

Which is the answer to almost any generalized question of law, which is why you pay a lawyer lots of money to represent you in court, because if the law was not filled with lots of “it depends” answers, trained monkeys could handle legal cases. :slight_smile:

5

Bingo. Your concise rephrasing of my OP is most helpful indeed. Surely though, there are some basic legal concepts that are relatively fundamental and objective such as the nature of negligence?

6

Actionable negligence = Breach of a duty proximately the cause of damages.

Now, do you feel enlightened? :stuck_out_tongue:

Well, neither did I, in law school. Which is why Torts was my only “C.” :smack:

7

xiix, I think you’re making an artificial distinction between “accidental” and “negligent.” Here’s a quick background (negligence takes up most of one full semester of torts class in law school).

In law, “negligence” means, in short, “harming someone without intent to do so.” You can intend to do the act that harms someone, but not intend the effect of harming them, and still be negligent. Example: You run through a stop sign because you’re in a hurry, and hit someone. You intended to run through the stop sign, but didn’t intend to harm the person. This is negligence.

To oversimplify for the sake of clarity, an act that unintentionally causes harm is a negligent act.

There are five elements to determining negligence:
[ul]
[li]Duty: The defendant in the negligence action (“D”) had a duty to do/not do something. In this case, you have a duty to stop at stop signs, to obey traffic laws.[/li][li]Breach: D must have breached the duty. I.e., by running the stop sign.[/li][li]Harm: There must be demonstrable harm to the Plaintiff. No harm = no cause of action. If you ran a stop sign and didn’t hit anyone, you couldn’t be successfully sued for negligence. (You could, of course, be given a criminal citation. But we’re talking negligence here.)[/li][li]Cause-In-Fact: This is also called “but-for causation,” as in, “But for D’s act, the harm would not have occurred.” If you hadn’t run the stop sign, the Plaintiff wouldn’t have been harmed. [/li][li]Proximate Causation: This one can be somewhat nebulous, but it generally means that the harm caused must have been within the foreseeable scope of the risk created by the Defendant’s act. Hitting someone because you run a stop sign is foreseeable. But if you rob a bank, and someone hears about it on the radio and has a heart attack, that’s probably not foreseeable. [/li][/ul]

I don’t see anything in there that would be changed by one’s being drunk. The bit about foreseeability is probably closest, but it doesn’t depend on whether you actually foresaw the danger; it depends, as Noel Prosequi said, on whether a reasonably prudent person would have foreseen it.

While drunkenness won’t turn a non-negligent action into a negligent one, it certainly won’t help your case when you get to trial.

8

I guess you have a point DS, but I rather took the view that the “main point” was sufficiently wide of the mark that it required substantial unpacking, if I was not to give an “it depends” answer :).

The practical significance of drunkenness will frequently not be found in the elements of the tort (although I hoped I had made the general point that Homo Clapham Omnibus is sober) but in the evidential consequences. And all of that is more complex that just wondering if drunkenness can make something actionable which otherwise wouldn’t be. One can’t simply play with the facts like that as though real litigation were like a controlled experiment.