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Law of Torts

An intentional tort is when a wrongful or a harmful act is done intentionally. For an

individual to be considered to have committed an intentional tort, they have to engage

in a harmful or wrongful act with the full knowledge of the consequences of their

action and with the conscious intention of causing harm or being wrong (Jacob 847).

The other type of tort is referred to as an unintentional tort of negligence. Negligence

occurs when an individual engages in wrongful or harmful action without the

intention of being wrong or causing harm to others (Jacob 847). In November 2016, a

Louisiana high school teacher had a torts case she had brought against the school

board tossed out. The teacher had sued the school board after a student punched her

repeatedly in the stomach at a time when she was pregnant. The case brought in front

of the court after she gave birth to a child who had kidney failure. The teacher

claimed that the reason for her child’s kidney failure was because she had been

punched repeatedly in the stomach during her pregnancy and that the school was

negligent because it ad allowed the student to be in class, despite numerous

disciplinary incidents.

In tossing the case out, the court followed the law of torts, especially as pertains

to unintentional tort or negligence. For a person or an institution, to be determined to

have been negligent,there are five elements to their case that can be applied as

outlined forthwith. It must be determined that they have the legal duty to care for the

victim, that they breached that duty, that their actions caused damage, that they are the
cause of the said document, and that they were the proximate cause of the damage

(Jacob 847). In the above example, while the case fit for the negligence of many

accounts, it failed for two reasons, that the school board did not physically engage in

the act that caused the injury, and that the board did not know with any level of

certainty that the teacher would face injury in the course of her work.
 Work Cited

Jacob, Bernard E. "Torts: Statutory Violation By The Employer And A FELA Law Of

Torts". California Law Review, vol 46, no. 5, 1958, p. 847. JSTOR,

doi:10.2307/3478630.