What is the Legal Doctrine of Res Ipsa Loquitur?

One very interesting doctrine of law is the doctrine of Res Ipsa Loquitor. In Latin, res ipsa loquitur means “the thing speaks for itself.” Under the doctrine of res ipsa loquitur, a person or party is presumed under the law to be negligent if he/she/it had exclusive control of whatever object caused the injury even though there is no specific evidence of any act of negligence, and when there is no way the accident or incident would have occurred without negligence on the part of the person or party.

An example of res ipsa loquitur is if a barrel of flour rolls out of a high warehouse window and falls upon and injures a pedestrian walking on the sidewalk below, and the warehouse owner/workers are liable for the pedestrian’s injuries even though no one actually saw the barrel of flour fall. This doctrine of law is one form of circumstantial evidence that permits a reasonable person to presume that the most probable cause of an accident was the defendant’s negligence. Res ipsa loquitur is usually used when there is no direct evidence of the defendant’s negligence.

There are three (3) basic requirements that must be satisfied before a court can submit the question of negligence to the jury under res ipsa loquitur. First, the plaintiff’s injury must be of a type that does not ordinarily occur unless someone has been negligent. Such as with the flour barrel example above, a barrel of flour would not normally roll out of a window of a warehouse unless someone in the warehouse has been negligent. Another example would be a falling elevator or the presence of a dead mouse in a bottle of soda.

The second requirement is that the plaintiff’s injury or damage must have been caused by an object or condition that was within the exclusive control of the defendant. Such as, if the flour barrel was only under the control of the warehouse workers in the example above, then the res ipsa loquitur would apply.

The third requirement is that the event in question must not have been attributable to any cause for which the plaintiff is responsible. The plaintiff must not have done anything that significantly contributed to the accident that caused the injury. For instance, the pedestrian in the example above did not do anything to cause the barrel to fall on him from the warehouse window. He was only walking along the sidewalk below.

While the defendant is presumed to be negligent under the doctrine of res ipsa loquitur, the defendant is able to present any evidence or explanations demonstrating other causes for the plaintiff’s injuries or the accident. In that case, it will be the function of the jury to decide whether the defendant was negligent.

Timothy B. Sanders, Burnetti, P.A.