Reasonable person
In law, a reasonable person or reasonable man is a hypothetical person whose character and care conduct, under any common set of facts, is decided through reasoning of good practice or policy. It is a legal fiction crafted by the courts and communicated through case law and jury instructions. In some practices, for circumstances arising from an uncommon set of facts, this person represents a composite of a relevant community's judgment as to how a typical member of that community should behave in situations that might pose a threat of harm to the public.
The reasonable person is used as a tool to standardize, teach law students, or explain the law to a jury. The reasonable person belongs to a family of hypothetical figures in law including: the "right-thinking member of society", the "officious bystander", the "reasonable parent", the "reasonable landlord", the "fair-minded and informed observer", the "person having ordinary skill in the art" in patent law. Ancient predecessors of the reasonable person include the bonus pater familias of ancient Rome, the bonus vir and spoudaios in ancient Greece as well as the geru maa in ancient Egypt.
While there is a loose consensus on its meaning in black letter law, there is no accepted technical definition, and the "reasonable person" is an emergent concept of common law. The reasonable person is not an average person or a typical person, leading to difficulties in applying the concept in some criminal cases, especially in regard to the partial defence of provocation. Most recently, Valentin Jeutner has argued that it matters less whether the reasonable person is reasonable, officious or diligent but rather that the most important characteristic of the reasonable person is that they are another person. As with legal fiction in general, it is somewhat susceptible to ad hoc manipulation or transformation. Strictly according to the fiction, it is misconceived for a party to seek evidence from actual people to establish how someone would have acted or what he would have foreseen. However, changes in the standard may be "learned" by high courts over time if there is a compelling consensus of public opinion.
The standard also holds that each person owes a duty to behave as a reasonable person would under the same or similar circumstances. While the specific circumstances of each case will require varying kinds of conduct and degrees of care, the reasonable person standard undergoes no variation itself. The standard does not exist independently of other circumstances within a case that could affect an individual's judgement. In cases resulting in judgment notwithstanding verdict, a vetted jury's composite judgment can be deemed beyond that of the reasonable person, and thus overruled.
The "reasonable person" construct can be found applied in many areas of the law. The standard performs a crucial role in determining negligence in both criminal law—that is, criminal negligence—and tort law. The standard is also used in contract law, to determine contractual intent, or whether there has been a breach of the standard of care. The intent of a party can be determined by examining the understanding of a reasonable person, after consideration is given to all relevant circumstances of the case including the negotiations, any practices the parties have established between themselves, usages and any subsequent conduct of the parties. During the Nuremberg Trials, Sir David Maxwell Fyfe introduced the standard of the reasonable person to international law. Nowadays known as the standard of the 'reasonable military commander', international courts use it to assess the conduct of military officers in times of war.
History
The "reasonable man" appeared in Richard Hooker's defence of conservatism in religion, the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, where he preferred Papists to Turks and accepted the opinions of religious experts when there was no reason to dissent.In 1835, Adolphe Quetelet detailed the characteristics of l'homme moyen. His work is translated into English several ways. As a result, some authors pick "average man", "common man", "reasonable man", or stick to the original "l'homme moyen". Quetelet was a Belgian astronomer, mathematician, statistician and sociologist. He documented the physical characteristics of man on a statistical basis and discussed man's motivations when acting in society.
Two years later, the "reasonable person" made his first appearance in the English case of Vaughan v. Menlove. In Menlove, the defendant had stacked hay on his rental property in a manner prone to spontaneous ignition. After he had been repeatedly warned over the course of five weeks, the hay ignited and burned the defendant's barns and stable and then spread to the landlord's two cottages on the adjacent property. Menlove's attorney admitted his client's "misfortune of not possessing the highest order of intelligence," arguing that negligence should only be found if the jury decided Menlove had not acted with "bona fide to the best of his judgment."
The Menlove court disagreed, reasoning that such a standard would be too subjective, instead preferring to set an objective standard for adjudicating cases:
English courts upheld the standard again nearly 20 years later in Blyth v. Company Proprietors of the Birmingham Water Works. In the case, Sir Edward Hall Alderson held:
Rationale
explained the theory behind the reasonable person standard as stemming from the impossibility of "measuring a man's powers and limitations." Individual, personal quirks inadvertently injuring the persons or property of others are no less damaging than intentional acts. For society to function, "a certain average of conduct, a sacrifice of individual peculiarities going beyond a certain point, is necessary to the general welfare." Thus, a reasonable application of the law is sought, compatible with planning, working, or getting along with others. As such, "his neighbors accordingly require him, at his proper peril, to come up to their standard, and the courts which they establish decline to take his personal equation into account." He heralded the reasonable person as a legal fiction whose care conduct under any common set of facts, is chosen—or "learned" permitting there is a compelling consensus of public opinion—by the courts.The reasonable person standard, contrary to popular conception, is intentionally distinct from that of the "average person," who is not necessarily guaranteed to always be reasonable. The reasonable person will weigh all of the following factors before acting:
- the foreseeable risk of harm his actions create versus the utility of his actions;
- the extent of the risk so created;
- the likelihood such risk will actually cause harm to others;
- any alternatives of lesser risk, and the costs of those alternatives.
The reasonable person has been called an "excellent but odious character."
English legal scholar Percy Henry Winfield summarized much of the literature by observing that:
Hand Rule
Under United States common law, a well known—though nonbinding—test for determining how a reasonable person might weigh the criteria listed above was set down in United States v. Carroll Towing Co. in 1947 by the Chief Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, Learned Hand. The case concerned a barge that had broken her mooring with the dock. Writing for the court, Hand said:While the test offered by Hand does not encompass all the criteria available above, juries in a negligence case might well still be instructed to take the other factors into consideration in determining whether the defendant was negligent.
The Sedona Conference issued its Commentary on a Reasonable Security Test to advance the Hand Rule for a cybersecurity context.The commentary adds three important articulations to the Hand Rule; a person is reasonable if no alternative safeguard would have provided an added benefit that was greater than the added burden, the utility of the risk should be considered as a factor in the calculation, and both qualitative and quantitative factors may be used in the test.
Personal circumstances
The legal fiction of the reasonable person is an ideal, as nobody is perfect. Everyone has limitations on their personal capacity, both mental and physical, on their available resources and on their level of knowledge either of a situation or of facts in general, so the standard requires only that people act similarly to how "a reasonable person under the circumstances" would, as if their limitations were themselves circumstances. As such, courts require that the reasonable person be viewed as having the same limitations as the defendant.For example, a disabled defendant is held to a standard that represents how a reasonable person with that same disability would act. This is no excuse for poor judgment, or trying to act beyond one's abilities. Were it so, there would be as many standards as there were defendants; and courts would spend innumerable hours, and the parties much more money, on determining that particular defendant's.
By using the reasonable person standard, courts instead use an objective tool and avoid such subjective evaluations. when attempting to determine liability.
Children
One broad allowance made to the reasonable person standard is for children. The standard here requires that a child act in a similar manner to how a "reasonable person of like age, intelligence, and experience under like circumstances" would act. In many common law systems, children under the age of 6 or 7 are typically exempt from any liability, whether civil or criminal, as they are deemed to be unable to understand the risk involved in their actions. This is called the defense of infancy: in Latin, doli incapax.In some jurisdictions, one of the exceptions to these allowances concern children engaged in what is primarily considered to be high-risk adult activity, such as operating a motor vehicle, and in some jurisdictions, children can also be "tried as an adult" for serious crimes, such as murder, which causes the court to disregard the defendant's age.