Also known as: utmost degree of care · extraordinary care · highest degree of care
Written by attorneys — see sources below.
A high degree of care that a prudent person exercises in dealing with very important personal affairs or that a professional exercises in a given situation.
Uriel Urban kept a tiger in a reinforced enclosure with daily inspections and multiple barriers. A guest wandered off the path during an emergency and suffered a bite. Uriel had met the highest standard of confinement efforts yet remained liable for the injury under the governing rule.
Umeko Uchida owned a dog that had previously nipped a worker. She installed extra fencing and supervised all interactions with the highest level of attention. The dog bit a visitor anyway. Umeko faced liability despite those extensive precautions.
Upland Industries conducted aerial pesticide application using advanced equipment and strict wind monitoring protocols. Spray drifted onto a neighbor's property despite those measures. Upland remained subject to liability for the resulting harm.
Unity Capital used controlled explosives for a logging project and employed every available safety protocol. Vibrations still damaged a nearby home. The company could not escape responsibility even after demonstrating the highest preventive efforts.
B. W. Foster owned a mink ranch located in a rural area one and one-half miles east of North Bend in King County, Washington. The ranch occupied seven and one-half acres and included seven sheds housing mink in welded wire cages with wood roofs. The property sat about two blocks from U.S. Highway No. 10 and near Northern Pacific Railway tracks and Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul & Pacific Railroad tracks. Preston Mill Company engaged in logging operations in the adjacent area. Early in May 1951, the company began constructing a road approximately two and one-quarter miles southwest of the mink ranch and twenty-five hundred feet above it along Rattlesnake Ledge. To build the road, the company used explosives, setting off blasts twice daily at noon and the end of the workday, with charges usually limited to fifty pounds and occasionally reaching one hundred pounds. The whelping season for mink begins about May 1 and lasts about two and one-half weeks, during which mothers are highly excitable and may kill their kittens if disturbed by noises or vibrations. Roy A. Peterson, the ranch manager, observed that the blasting caused tremendous vibrations that rattled boxes on the cages, leading mother mink to run back and forth and kill their young. Before the season progressed far, thirty-five or forty kittens had been killed. Peterson informed the manager of Preston Mill Company about the losses. Although no request was made to stop the blasting, the company reduced the amount of explosives per shot from nineteen or twenty sticks to fourteen sticks. Officials of the company noted that halting road construction during the whelping period would have been impractical due to scheduling and expense concerns. Foster filed suit against Preston Mill Company seeking damages only for losses occurring after the company received notice of the effects on the mink. After a trial to the court without a jury on a second amended complaint alleging absolute liability and alternatively nuisance, the trial court entered judgment for Foster in the amount of $1,953.68 based on absolute liability for post-notice damages. The court found no public nuisance, and Foster conceded that the trial court had ruled in the company's favor on the nuisance claim. Preston Mill Company appealed the judgment.
View caseUniversal Motors installed tubing that later ruptured under normal pressure. The manufacturer had followed all industry testing and quality protocols. Liability attached regardless of those extensive precautions taken during production.
Around 2:30 a.m. on June 20, 2007, neighbors reported a fire that had erupted at the home of the Tinchers in Downingtown, Pennsylvania. Investigators concluded that a lightning strike near the Tinchers’ home caused a small puncture in the corrugated stainless steel tubing transporting natural gas to a fireplace. The CSST was part of the TracPipe System manufactured and sold by Omega Flex. The resulting fire burned for over an hour and caused significant damage to the home and belongings. Following the fire, the Tinchers reported the incident to their insurer, United Services Automobile Association. USAA compensated the Tinchers for their loss up to the limit of their policy and received an assignment of liability claims. The Tinchers suffered an additional out-of-pocket loss because a portion of their claimed loss exceeded the limits of the USAA policy. In January 2008, the Tinchers filed a complaint against Omega Flex in the Chester County Court of Common Pleas. They asserted claims premised upon theories of strict liability, negligence, and breach of warranty, with the strict liability claim based on Section 402A of the Second Restatement. The case proceeded to a jury trial in October 2010 before Judge Ronald C. Nagle. The Tinchers offered expert testimony that the CSST walls were only one-hundredth of an inch thick and therefore inherently defective because lightning-generated currents were highly likely to perforate them. Omega Flex presented its own experts who testified that the TracPipe System met all applicable industry standards. They also stated that the lightning strike lacked sufficient energy to cause the puncture and that an attempted bonding clamp found disconnected after the fire may have prevented the incident if properly installed. After the close of evidence, the trial court denied Omega Flex’s motions for nonsuit and directed verdict. On October 20, 2010, the jury returned a verdict in favor of the Tinchers on the strict liability claim. The jury awarded compensatory damages totaling $958,895.85 plus delay damages. The jury found for Omega Flex on the negligence claim. Omega Flex filed post-trial motions that the trial court denied, leading to entry of judgment. The Superior Court affirmed the judgment in September 2012. The Supreme Court granted Omega Flex’s petition for allowance of appeal limited to the question of whether to replace the strict liability analysis of the Second Restatement with that of the Third Restatement.
View caseUnited Bank marketed a product with full internal compliance reviews and risk assessments. A jury imposed punitive damages after finding harm to consumers. The bank's documented high-level preventive steps did not shield it from the award.
Jesse Williams, a heavy smoker of Marlboro cigarettes, died from smoking-related causes. His widow, representing his estate as respondent, brought a state-court action for negligence and deceit against Philip Morris, the manufacturer. The jury found that Williams's death was caused by smoking, that he smoked in significant part because Philip Morris knowingly and falsely led him to believe it was safe, and that Philip Morris was negligent and had engaged in deceit. It awarded approximately $821,000 in compensatory damages, consisting of about $21,000 economic and $800,000 noneconomic, together with $79.5 million in punitive damages. The trial judge found the punitive award excessive and reduced it to $32 million. Both sides appealed. The Oregon Court of Appeals rejected Philip Morris's arguments and restored the original $79.5 million jury award. After the Supreme Court remanded in light of State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Co. v. Campbell, the Oregon Court of Appeals adhered to its original views, and the Oregon Supreme Court granted review. In closing argument the plaintiff's attorney told the jury to consider how many other Oregon smokers Philip Morris's conduct had harmed. The argument referenced ten deaths per hundred smokers and Philip Morris's one-third market share. Philip Morris requested an instruction stating that the jury could consider harm to others in determining the reasonable relationship between the award and harm to Williams. The request added that the jury could not punish the defendant for the impact of its misconduct on nonparties who might bring their own lawsuits. The trial court rejected the proposed instruction and instead told the jury that punitive damages punish and deter misconduct and are not intended to compensate anyone. The Oregon Supreme Court rejected Philip Morris's claims that the Constitution prohibits punishing a defendant for harm to nonparties and that the roughly 100-to-1 ratio made the award grossly excessive. Philip Morris petitioned for certiorari, which the Supreme Court granted limited to the questions of punishment for nonparty harm and the required relationship to the plaintiff's harm.
View caseNo. The rule imposes liability on a possessor of a wild animal for harm caused by the animal even when the possessor has exercised the utmost care to confine it or prevent harm.
Supporting sources
Utmost care is a higher degree of care than the reasonable care required in ordinary negligence cases. Negligence uses the standard of a reasonably prudent person under the circumstances rather than the highest conceivable level of precaution.
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Yes. Some jurisdictions impose a heightened duty of utmost care on common carriers toward passengers, though the precise application varies and is often contrasted with the ordinary reasonable care standard.
No. One who carries on an abnormally dangerous activity remains subject to liability for resulting harm even after exercising the utmost care to prevent it.
Supporting sources
…as he chose; the defendant was responsible for the consequences of the blow, unless it appeared that he was in the exercise of extraordinary care, so that the accident was inevitable, using the word inevitable not in a strict but a popular sense." "If, however, the plaintiff, when he met with the injury, was not in the exercise of…