Personal injury refers to an area of law that deals with compensating people injured by someone else’s wrongful conduct. In everyday life, we owe our fellow citizens what the law calls a duty of care. As part of living in a community, we all are expected to conduct ourselves in a reasonable manner that doesn’t harm others. When someone breaches that duty by acting in a way that hurts someone else, even if not on purpose, the law says the person who breached the duty will owe damages to the person harmed. This, in the most basic sense, is what personal injury law is about.
From this simple explanation, you can also see how personal injury law plays an essential role in civic life. Personal injury law gives people the ability to remedy physical harm done to them without resorting to violence or retribution. It also plays a critical part in shaping how large enterprises conduct themselves. By holding people and companies financially accountable for their wrongful actions, personal injury law helps to keep the population safe and forms a foundation of what it means to receive justice.
It is also important to understand what personal injury law is not. Personal injury lawsuits separate and apart from criminal law, which aims to punish violations of criminal statutes. The wrong someone does to you can constitute both a crime and an act that brings personal injury law into play. But more often, personal injury law deals with situations in which someone did not necessarily intend to do harm, but did harm anyway. Personal injury law is also separate from other areas of law, such as such as breaches of contract or property disputes, that address acts that don’t have physical injury component.
