Is the Hotel Liable? Essay Example

What has to be determined is if a duty of care was owed? A duty cannot be owed to the whole world and is not held in a vacuum. There are some standards which must be met to determine who owes a duty.  Who owes a duty of care? A duty is owed to those who reasonably would foresee damage or to thy neighbor through the infamous neighbor test in Lord Aitkin’s Neighbor Test which held you must look at the proximate relationship and the foreseeable harm caused. Next you have to look at proximity to the damage. The victim was found severely beaten just three blocks from the hotel. Next you have to look at causation both legal and factual. After factually proving something the remoteness of harm comes into play with legal causation. Was the access or lack of controlling the access to the elevators the superseding cause of the damage to the defendant? Was this the proximate cause? We determine this by asking, “but for the hotels negligence would the incident have occurred”? If the answer to this is no then the proximate and legal causation has been satisfied. Possible defenses to this act are that the defendant was intoxicated and that was a contributory cause to the act and this may help to defend the Plaintiff and relive the hotel but it is likely the court will find some fault with the hotel because of the other elements to the crime being met. All the elements of the crime have to be proven to assert negligence to the hotel owners. If one element of the crime is missing the hotel will not be responsible.

References

Negligence Legal Causation Retrieved July 24, 2010 from, http://ezinearticles.com/?Negligence—Legal-Causation&id=2292629