Reasonable person

In law, a reasonable person, reasonable man, or the man on the Clapham omnibus is a hypothetical person of legal fiction crafted by the courts and communicated through case law and jury instructions.The care taken by a prudent man has always been the rule laid down; and as to the supposed difficulty of applying it, a jury has always been able to say, whether, taking that rule as their guide, there has been negligence on the occasion in question. Instead, therefore, of saying that the liability for negligence should be co-extensive with the judgment of each individual, which would be as variable as the length of the foot of each individual, we ought rather to adhere to the rule which requires in all cases a regard to caution such as a man of ordinary prudence would observe. That was, in substance, the criterion presented to the jury in this case and, therefore, the present rule must be discharged.Negligence is the omission to do something which a reasonable man, guided upon those considerations which ordinarily regulate the conduct of human affairs, would do, or doing something which a prudent and reasonable man would not do.He is an ideal, a standard, the embodiment of all those qualities which we demand of the good citizen ... invariably looks where he is going, ... is careful to examine the immediate foreground before he executes a leap or bound; ... neither stargazes nor is lost in meditation when approaching trapdoors or the margins of a dock; ... never mounts a moving and does not alight from any car while the train is in motion, ... uses nothing except in moderation, and even flogs his child in meditating only on the golden mean.e has not the courage of Achilles, the wisdom of Ulysses or the strength of Hercules, nor has he the prophetic vision of a clairvoyant. He will not anticipate folly in all its forms but he never puts out of consideration the teachings of experience and so will guard against negligence of others when experience shows such negligence to be common. He is a reasonable man but not a perfect citizen, nor a 'paragon of circumspection. ...'he owner's duty, as in other similar situations, to provide against resulting injuries is a function of three variables: (1) The probability that she will break away; (2) the gravity of the resulting injury, if she does; (3) the burden of adequate precautions. In law, a reasonable person, reasonable man, or the man on the Clapham omnibus is a hypothetical person of legal fiction crafted by the courts and communicated through case law and jury instructions. Strictly according to the fiction, it is misconceived for a party to seek evidence from actual people in order to establish how the reasonable man would have acted or what he would have foreseen. This person's character and care conduct under any common set of facts, is decided through reasoning of good practice or policy—or 'learned' permitting there is a compelling consensus of public opinion—by high courts. In some practices, for circumstances arising from an uncommon set of facts, this person is seen to represent a composite of a relevant community's judgement as to how a typical member of said community should behave in situations that might pose a threat of harm (through action or inaction) to the public. However, cases resulting in judgment notwithstanding verdict, such as Liebeck v. McDonald's Restaurants, can be examples where a vetted jury's composite judgment were deemed outside that of the actual fictional reasonable person, and thus overruled. The reasonable person belongs to a family of hypothetical figures in law including: the 'right-thinking member of society,' the 'officious bystander,' the 'reasonable parent,' the 'reasonable landlord,' the 'fair-minded and informed observer,' the 'person having ordinary skill in the art' in patent law, and stretching back to Roman jurists, the figure of the bonus paterfamilias, all used to define legal standards. While there is a loose consensus in black letter law, there is no accepted technical definition. As with legal fiction in general, it is somewhat susceptible to ad hoc manipulation or transformation, and hence the 'reasonable person' is an emergent concept of common law. The 'reasonable person' is used as a tool to standardize, teach law students, or explain the law to a jury. As a legal fiction, the 'reasonable person' is not an average person or a typical person, leading to great difficulties in applying the concept in some criminal cases, especially in regards to the partial defence of provocation. The standard also holds that each person owes a duty to behave as a reasonable person would under the same or similar circumstances. While the specific circumstances of each case will require varying kinds of conduct and degrees of care, the reasonable person standard undergoes no variation itself. The 'reasonable person' construct can be found applied in many areas of the law. The standard performs a crucial role in determining negligence in both criminal law—that is, criminal negligence—and tort law. The standard is also used in contract law, to determine contractual intent, or (when there is a duty of care) whether there has been a breach of the standard of care. The intent of a party can be determined by examining the understanding of a reasonable person, after consideration is given to all relevant circumstances of the case including the negotiations, any practices the parties have established between themselves, usages and any subsequent conduct of the parties.