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Dear Prudence
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I ended my last column with a mouthful of legal jargon, which takes all the fun out of negligence and leaves it as dead and uninteresting as a background corpse in a horror flick.
I finished with that clever and pithy phrase: “. . .the person at fault is not negligent if he had acted with ordinary prudence to avoid foreseeable injury.” Yuck! What does that mean? Ordinary Prudence? What’s prudence anyway---Other than an old Beatles’ song?
When we think of the word prudence, we think of that stuffy teacher in grade school, who wore her polyester dresses buttoned up to the neck and walked around like she was better than the rest of us. But prudence in a legal sense actually refers to very normal, un-prudish behavior. It can be translated as: not acting like a turkey. It is the opposite of being a jackass or clueless. Prudence is not prudish, it’s just being in touch with reality.
Foreseeable is another one of those words that seems overwhelming. For those of us who do not have an accurate crystal ball, it is sometimes hard to decide what is a foreseeable injury and what is not.
Some things are as easily foreseeable as the LA Lakers making the playoffs. Other things, like the Nuggets making the playoffs, are not. Since a lot of money (in the form of a jury award or sizable settlement from an insurance company) may be riding on whether the injury was foreseeable, the courts have spent a lot of time wrestling with the concept.
We don’t know for sure what will happen in the future but there are some things that can be reasonably anticipated. If you shake a can of soda then open it, you can expect it to foam up and splatter all over the counter. If you throw a banana peel on a busy sidewalk, you can reasonably expect someone to slip on it.
Acting with ordinary prudence to avoid foreseeable injury means being practical and aware of the likely consequences of your actions. For most people, this is just normal, everyday reality. It’s when people try to take short cuts or cut corners that negligence enters the picture..
