 |
 |
to fill out a simple form to connect to Personal Injury Lawyers in your area.
|
|
|
|
|
City of Chicago v. Beretta U.S.A. Corp.11/18/2004
nuisance." 337 Ill. App. 3d at 17-18. In reaching this conclusion, the appellate court relied upon section 824 of the Restatement and comment b thereto.
Section 824, however, does not address the element of proximate cause. Instead, it deals with the type of conduct essential to liability for public or private nuisance. An actor will be held liable for a nuisance if his conduct consists of: "(a) an act; or (b) a failure to act under circumstances in which the actor is under a duty to take positive action to prevent or abate the interference" that constitutes the nuisance. Restatement (Second) of Torts §824 (1979). In the "ordinary case," comment b instructs, liability for nuisance "arises because one person's acts set in motion a force or chain of events resulting in the invasion." Restatement (Second) of Torts §824, Comment b (1979). Further, " o far as the actor's liability is concerned, it is immaterial whether he does the acts solely in the pursuit of his own interests or whether he is acting for another, gratuitously, under contract or as the other's servant or agent. It is enough that his acts are a legal cause of the invasion." (Emphasis added.) Restatement (Second) of Torts §824, Comment b (1979). Thus, section 824 and comment b do not provide the answer to the question of whether the alleged conduct of defendants constitutes a legal cause of the claimed nuisance. Rather, comment b merely poses the question-Is the conduct of these defendants a legal cause of the alleged interference with a public right? The answer to this question must be found elsewhere.
In cases involving claims of negligence or nuisance, Illinois courts draw a distinction between condition and cause. First Springfield Bank & Trust v. Galman, 188 Ill. 2d 252, 257 (1999). If a defendant's breach of duty furnishes a condition by which injury is made possible and a third person, acting independently, subsequently causes the injury, the defendant's creation of the condition is not a proximate cause of the injury. Briske v. Village of Burnham, 379 Ill. 193, 199 (1942).
In Galman, this court was urged to abandon this approach and to apply the proximate cause standard of Lee to all cases involving a question of proximate cause, even those in which the immediate cause of the injury is the subsequent, independent act of a third person. See, e.g., W. Keeton, Prosser & Keeton on Torts §42, at 278 (" `Cause' and `condition' still find occasional mention in the decisions; but the distinction is now almost entirely discredited"). Rather than abandon our long-standing framework for the analysis of proximate cause, we instead harmonized our precedents with the proximate cause test articulated in Lee. See Galman, 188 Ill. 2d at 257-58. See also Abrams v. City of Chicago , 211 Ill. 2d 251, 259 (2004) (restating the applicability of cause versus condition analysis to a special subset of proximate cause cases involving injuries caused by the intervening acts of third parties).
Under the Lee standard, as noted above, cause in fact exists if the defendant's conduct is "a material element and a substantial factor in bringing about the injury." Lee, 152 Ill. 2d at 455. Legal cause, however, is "essentially a question of foreseeability." Lee, 152 Ill. 2d at 456. The relevant inquiry is whether the injury is of a type that a reasonable person would see as a likely result of his conduct. Lee, 152 Ill. 2d at 456. This court has rejected the implication that the Lee test is incompatible with earlier decisions involving a "particular subset of cases," in which subsequent acts of third parties constituted an intervening and efficient cause of the injury. See Galman, 188 Ill. 2d at 259, citing Briske, 379 Ill. 193 (vill
Page 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 Illinois Personal Injury Attorneys
Personal Injury Lawyers
|
| |
to fill out a simple form to connect to Personal Injury Lawyers in your area.
|
|