Cause Of Action: Kingston High School (KHS)

Cause of Action

The plaintiff in this case is Mary and the defendant is the Kingston High School (KHS). Mary has a cause of action for her physical injury sustained during the football game and economic loss arising from her injury. The defendant is liable to the plaintiff for negligence. The high school has vicarious liability for its cheerleaders, football players and coaches.

Statement of Law and Analysis

The defendant, KHS, owed the plaintiff, Mary, a duty of care. Mary was a foreseeable plaintiff. The football field is surrounded by KHS, the university business school and the university’s largest residence. Hence, it is foreseeable that university students would use the field as a shortcut from the business school back to the residence.

KHS could not reasonably foresee Mary as a plaintiff. The reasonable person would notice the football game and hence take the alternative longer route. Mary acted irrationally because she was feeling sick and wanted to get home as quickly as possible in the bad weather. KHS could not have foreseen that a university student would persist on cutting across the field and walk down the sidelines during a game. The connection between causation in fact and the consequences are too remote to be deemed causation in law. Therefore, KHS did not cause the harm suffered by Mary.

The second defense is contributory negligence. Mary saw that there was a football game going on and yet she still chose to walk down the sidelines behind the cheerleaders to take the shortcut back to residence. She was negligent in taking the standard of care to remove herself from danger’s way. Thus, Mary’s physical was partially due to her own negligence in the situation.

Conclusion

The likely outcome of this case is that KHS was negligent to Mary and liable for her physical injury and economic loss. KHS owed a duty of care to Mary even though she was not there to attend the game. The reason for the plaintiff being on the field is irrelevant in the situation. Lastly, the harm was reasonably foreseeable when the plaintiff was on the

The role of the courts has three purposes: custodian of the constitution, statutory interpretation and arbiter of private disputes. Since the S.C.C. is the final court of appeal in Canada and rules on the constitutionality of both federal and provincial statues, it only accepts cases that deal with matters of public importance or if it raises an important issue of law. However, civil lawsuit deals with private rights and liabilities that rarely implicate policy considerations. One example would be the case of Childs v. Desormeaux, where the S.C.C. became involved in deciding whether a social host of a party should owe a duty of care to an uninvited guest away from the party. It was ultimately determined that the hosts in this situation did not owe a duty of care because they were unaware the level at which Desormeaux was intoxicated and they did not serve alcohol at their