Reasonable Care
The doctrine of reasonable care indicates the degree (amount) of caution and concern a rational person should have demonstrated for the safety of other persons and/or property under a given set of conditions. Reasonable care is a subjective test of liability and thus is open to some interpretation by the court.
A defendant who is shown to have failed in the exercise of reasonable care is considered to be negligent. The doctrine of reasonable care is not usually defined by statute, although codified legislation often develops from individual cases over time. When the standard of reasonable care is presented in a case, it is an explicit way of stating what is implicitly understood to be the responsibility one party has for the health and safety of another.
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When failure to demonstrate reasonable care is proven, the defendant can be held liable for any resultant injury or loss. The relationship which defines this obligation can be as brief as a few seconds or can last a lifetime.
An example of a short term relationship would be a case in which Svetlana backs out of her driveway and fails to look behind her. As a result, she runs into Yossel, who happens to be riding by on his bicycle at that moment. The court may find that Svetlana had an obligation of reasonable care toward Yossel (or anyone going by on the street at that moment) for those few seconds during which she was backing her vehicle.
The long-term obligation of reasonable care was illustrated in two court cases during the last decades of the twentieth century in which builders where determined to owe reasonable care toward all tenants that might take up residency in one of their structures over the span of its useful life (see Terlinde v. Neely, 275 S.C. 395, 271 S.E.2d 768 [1980] and Winnepeg Condominium Corporation No. 36 v. Bird Construction Co., 1 S.C.R. 85 [1995]).