Personal Injury Resources

A post about the Open and Obvious Doctrine and personal injury law.

The motivation for the open and obvious doctrine is easy to discern: it is ridiculous for a plaintiff to recover for an injury which he could easily see and guard against. But given the current climate of personal injury law, why shouldn’t juries be allowed to make those determinations, instead of judges? Is the judges’ “gatekeeper” function really necessary? It’s hard to imagine juries finding a plaintiff less than 50% negligent — the cutoff for any recovery — if the condition truly is open and obvious. Going back to handling this issue through a comparative negligence analysis would probably lead to the same results, would be more intellectually consistent and coherent, and would help restore courts and juries to the respective roles they were intended to perform.

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Read more from this blogger: Not So Obvious