One of the key distinctions in types of torts is whether an action was intentional or merely negligent. Professor Michael Moreland explains that these standards in tort law are less complex than when they are applied in criminal law. Most tort claims involve negligence, particularly carelessness, which involve harms that are not serious enough to be criminal. https://youtube.com/watch?v=IpvVreVA54I
It's important to keep separate, and this is a kind of key thing in a first year torts class, intentional or purposeful harms that arise; harms that arise out of the defendant being careless. And that's the kind of key distinction between intentional torts on the one hand and negligence on the other. The question of intention is one of whether the defendant had the purpose or aim of bringing about whatever the prohibited conduct is. Now, of course, there will very rarely be objective evidence of that. And so what usually then has to happen is if it ends up in a jury trial, for example, that the jury will surmise, or decide, based on the circumstantial factors or the circumstantial evidence that the defendant did in fact commit the tort with the right intention. I should say that torts, by distinction with criminal law; torts isn't usually as interested in the kind of finely grained distinctions of what in the criminal law they call mens rea, of kind of different layers of culpability of a person's mind. Instead in torts, we have I'd say a much more kind of simplified way of thinking about intention or carelessness in the context of negligence. There are some variations on that. Sometimes we talk about gross negligence or recklessness or wantonness, but for the most part, we're talking about a core distinction between either intentional purposeful harm or carelessness that posed some risk of injury. Carelessness is relevant to the tort of negligence, which is the sort of primary, or empirically the bulk of tort claims are negligence claims. And the question of care or carelessness is relevant to the question of whether or not the defendant, as we say, breached a standard of care, that is to say the standard of care of the reasonable person, or there might be a standard of care that's relevant in a professional setting for medical malpractice, for example; but it's calibrating whatever the objective standard of care is to the defendant's conduct to determine whether or not the defendant fell below what that standard of care is under the law.
