Comparative Negligence

Comparative negligence is a doctrine in tort law under which a plaintiff whose own negligence contributed to an injury has the resulting damages reduced, rather than entirely barred, in proportion to the degree that negligence contributed to the injury. It developed in American law as a replacement for the older contributory negligence rule, which denied any recovery at all to a plaintiff who bore even a small share of fault for causing the injury, and only a handful of states had adopted it before the late 1960s, after which it spread more widely. Under comparative negligence, a jury or other fact-finder apportions fault between the plaintiff and each of the other parties responsible for the injury and reduces the award to the plaintiff accordingly, rather than applying the older all-or-nothing bar. Several distinct comparative negligence schemes exist across American jurisdictions, differing chiefly in whether and at what percentage of fault a negligent plaintiff loses the right to recover entirely.