Unintentional Tort
Categories: Regulations
You're trying to make a cake, but you screw up the recipe. You end up with something similar, but not quite the same. An unintentional torte.
Meanwhile, an unintentional tort (no "e" at the end) represents a legal concept. A tort, generally speaking, consists of a wrongful act that causes someone harm, or some kind of loss. It's a concept in defining legal liability in civil court. An unintentional tort happens if you do something by accident which, nevertheless, causes loss or harm for someone. These cases usually involve negligence. Like...you didn't mean for anything bad to happen, but you didn't take proper steps to avoid trouble.
This category stands opposed to intentional torts, where the person means to cause harm. These include situations like physical violence, stealing, or committing emotional abuse.
You're standing on a subway platform and see a nickel on the ground. You bend down to pick it up and accidentally bump someone with your butt. They lose their balance and fall onto the tracks. A train hits them, derails, and starts a fire that quickly engulfs your station. The fire runs along the subway track, igniting each station along the way. Eventually, 20,000 people are killed and billions of dollars in infrastructure literally go up in flames. The city and most of your victims file a class action against you, claiming you committed an unintentional tort. In order to win a judgment, they have to prove that you acted negligently...i.e. that a reasonable person could have avoided the accident.
The trial eventually comes down to how far out you stuck out your rear while you were picking up the nickel, and whether that distance should be considered normal, or whether it represented "negligent overbending with wild posterior implications" as opposing counsel noted in their brief. (They also tried to introduce evidence that no reasonable person would bend over to pick up a nickel, but the judge eventually threw that argument out.)
You're eventually found liable and sent a bill for $20 billion. Well, with the nickel you found, you only really owe $19,999,999,999.95.
