Comments on: Jaywalking: Another law that nobody follows!

By: Louis Grube

Louis Grube — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 19:00:52 +0000

@Hamzat, Not cool man. Please be nice and keep it clean like we had asked.

By: Hamzat

Hamzat — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 18:58:46 +0000

@ashley, fuck off

By: tOM Trottier

tOM Trottier — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 23:32:20 +0000

It would make more sense if the law gave the right of way to the more vulnerable person, so trucks would give way to cars which would give way to cyclists which would give way to pedestrians.

tOM

By: Louis Grube

Louis Grube — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 14:49:00 +0000

@ashley, that just made my day!

By: ashley

ashley — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 15:22:23 +0000

during the first week of orientation, a very elderly professor was talking about the spirit vs. the letter of the law in regards to jaywalking. “i am a chicagoan, it is my birthright to jaywalk.”

and to end our sentences with prepositions.

By: Louis Grube

Louis Grube — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 14:41:30 +0000

@Joshua Auriemma,
You make some good points. I’d like to respond with three facts.
First off, I specified the great state of Ohio so as to get around the problem of not knowing much about negligence in other states. As far as I can tell it varies widely enough that a blog post would have been too short of a format to do negligence justice. (is that a pun? I can’t tell.)
Second, negligence per se may cause problems for a lawsuit happy pedestrian. I don’t know very much about how this is applied, but it occurs to me that this would only matter depending on the facts of the case, which I largely left out. I would disagree that all violations of the jay walking law would be negligent per se. Proximate Cause relies on the facts of the case (I’m avoiding a But-For joke…) and because of the interpretable nature of the counterfactual logical relationship it outlines, there could arguably be situations where a person would be technically jay walking and yet would have been unable to have acted otherwise. It seems to me that any time the jaywalker could say they were avoiding injury by jaywalking or if there could be established some sort of premeditated malice on the behalf of the driver, you could argue against a negligence per se argument. I will give you that I didn’t specify there was any sort of danger or malice. However, I’m pretty sure that if I had specified danger, I would have picked zombies.
That said, in my understanding of Ohio’s jay walking laws, according to Ohio Revised Code 4511.48: (E) “This section does not relieve the operator of a vehicle, streetcar, or trackless trolley from exercising due care to avoid colliding with any pedestrian upon any roadway.” I’m taking this to specify that breach of this law cannot be used to support a claim of negligence per se in the way you were suggesting, i.e. that because the accident wouldn’t have happened without jaywalking, then there would have been no injury and so the driver’s actions cannot be considered a cause. I’m not sure how this line has been used in the past, and my guess is that there is case law somewhere that clears all of this up, but I’m already being a bad bad finance director, and I can’t really afford to prove it by taking the time to, you know, actually looking for it.
Now, if I’m wrong about any of that, I’m just gonna put an addendum at the end of every article that I’m not only not a lawyer, but I probably don’t know what the hell I’m talking about.

By: Joshua Auriemma

Joshua Auriemma — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 02:16:52 +0000

Maybe I’m reading this wrong, but it seems that you don’t really account for states with pure contributory negligence or modified comparative negligence regimes. For instance, it’s possible that if a jury finds that the jaywalker is at all responsible for the accident, he or she may not be able to recover. Same goes for certain comparative negligence regimes where the jaywalker is a minimum of some percentage at fault.

There also may be an issue of negligence per se, where jaywalking could cause someone to lose off the bat under

any

kind of comparative/contributory negligence theory.

Of course, this is all theoretical and I’m basing my “knowledge” on 1L torts, so don’t take my word for it (Reading Raiiiinnnboowwww).