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Strict Liability

Liability for harm without any showing of carelessness - the rule for abnormally dangerous activities, for defective products in most states, and, under many state statutes, for the owner of a dog that bites.

Informational only - this is not legal advice. These definitions explain general legal vocabulary in plain English. They are not advice about your situation, reading them creates no attorney-client relationship, and the law differs from state to state and changes over time. For advice you can rely on, speak to a lawyer licensed in your state.

What it means

Most injury claims require proof that the defendant was careless. Strict liability is the set of situations in which the law dispenses with that requirement: the defendant is answerable for the harm because of what they did or kept, however carefully they did it. The injured person still has to prove that the activity or thing caused the injury and what the injury is worth; what they do not have to prove is fault.

The classic category is abnormally dangerous activities - blasting, storing explosives, keeping wild animals - where the risk cannot be eliminated by care and the person who chose to create it is made to bear it. The category that matters most in practice is products: in most states the seller of a product that leaves the seller's hands in a defective condition is strictly liable to the user or consumer injured by the defect, so the claim turns on the product rather than on the manufacturer's conduct. Dog bites are the everyday example: many states have replaced the common-law rule, under which an owner was liable only if they knew the animal was dangerous, with a statute making the owner liable for a bite regardless of the dog's history, subject to defences such as provocation or trespass.

Strict liability is not absolute liability. The injured person's own conduct still matters under the state's comparative-fault rules in most jurisdictions, causation must still be proved, and each category has its own defences. Workers' compensation is a different kind of no-fault scheme - a statutory benefit system rather than a tort rule - and is covered under its own entry.

Where this comes from

Strict liability is state law. The abnormally-dangerous-activity rule traces to Rylands v. Fletcher, L.R. 3 H.L. 330 (1868), and is stated in Restatement (Second) of Torts §§ 519-520; strict products liability in Restatement (Second) § 402A, adopted by most state courts, and reworked in the Restatement (Third) of Torts: Products Liability (1998). Dog-bite statutes exist in a majority of states and differ on what defences they allow; the remaining states keep the common-law knowledge rule.

When people hire a lawyer for this

The value of the doctrine is that it changes what has to be proved, and whether a claim falls inside it is a legal question a lawyer answers in the first conversation - a product case argued as negligence when strict liability was available has been made harder than it needed to be. In a dog-bite case the first question is which of the two rules the state follows, because under the common-law rule the animal's history is the whole case.

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Part of the LawyerLand plain-English legal glossary. Definitions are written from primary sources - statutes and court rules - and each entry states the authority it rests on, or says plainly when the doctrine is state law with no national rule.

If you cannot afford a lawyer, civil legal aid programmes provide free help with many of these problems: civil legal aid programmes by state.

Related free reference tools: statute of limitations for a personal-injury claim, by state, quoted from each state's official text - part of LawyerLand's legal reference tools.