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Examples Of Skateboarding Injury Liability

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Skateboarding Injury Liability: Who is Responsible? The long-haired Dogtown and Z-Boy skaters of the 70’s and 80’s have become grown-up travelers and they are backsliding their decks on crowded streets and throughways. This phenomenon may have aroused your interest in what constitutes liability for those on skateboards. Additionally, what would this mean in terms of skateboards being the alleged cause of injury and who can be ultimately be sued in the event of a skateboard crash? Like almost any other type of accident, the liability for an injury resulting from a skateboard crash would be considered under the umbrella of the law of negligence. The concept of negligence contains four distinct constituent parts which must be demonstrated in …show more content…

The obligation of care would, strictly-speaking, be demonstrating the carefulness and attention that any reasonably conscientious skater would show in the same or similar situation. Well, what does that actually mean? An explanatory example may help to understand. If the skateboarder you intend to sue did a back-fade Ollie (a somewhat tricky skating maneuver) while navigating a crowded sidewalk at the peak of rush hour. A maneuver of that type is most certainly unreasonable, from the standard of a normal rider, and likely to be considered a breach of the duty of care owed by someone who is behaving in a fundamentally responsible manner. Consequently, two of the four components of negligence are met. Following thaty, one would have to demonstrate clearly that the defendant skateboarder’s actions indeed caused your injury and that, in addition, there were no unforeseeable intervening circumstances that would mitigate the responsibility. In other words, the skater may argue that a car was coming in his direction in such a manner that it was necessary to force the move to the sidewalk. One could argue plausibly that was indeed a foreseeable event – although foreseeable does not necessarily negate causation. But if, say, a garbage truck going the wrong way down the street is what prompts the skater to perform a back-fade Ollie onto your legs, then causation is not as clear (although, you could potentially name the truck driver in the suit as

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