Contributory Negligence

Contributory negligence is a common law doctrine providing that a plaintiff who was negligent in a way that contributed to causing an injury to that plaintiff is completely barred from recovering damages from a negligent defendant, regardless of how small that share of fault was. It traces to the English case Butterfield v. Forrester, and it dominated American tort law through the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century, treating the negligence of a plaintiff as breaking the chain between the conduct of a defendant and the injury. Many jurisdictions have since replaced the harsh all-or-nothing effect of the doctrine with comparative negligence, which instead reduces the damages awarded to a plaintiff by the percentage of fault a fact-finder assigns to that plaintiff, so that a plaintiff found thirty percent at fault would still recover seventy percent of the damages. Some jurisdictions nonetheless retain pure contributory negligence, while others apply a modified comparative negligence rule, so the ability of a plaintiff to recover after contributing to an injury still depends heavily on the law of the jurisdiction involved.