In a person's actions that can create risk or harm to others, a person is generally held to a standard of care of that of a “reasonable and prudent” person. And so a reasonable and prudent person doesn't act perfectly. A reasonable and prudent person makes reasonable mistakes. But as I like to say in my class, a reasonable and prudent person is also unreasonably reasonable. The reasonable and prudent driver never takes his eyes off the road to look at his phone, even though the average person will do that. The reasonable and prudent driver always checks his surroundings and always signals before a turn and obeys the rules of the road. Of course, the reasonable and prudent person is a fiction. No one does this perfectly. But it does give us a fictionalized account of what is expected of people and their conduct. Now, when a person deviates from the reasonable and prudent person standard, the person is generally open to civil liability. And so a physician who fails to diagnose a disease that he ought to have diagnosed will be liable for medical malpractice. Or a person who checks his cell phone when he should have his eyes on the road and causes an accident for that reason will be liable for negligence. Now whether the person is criminally liable or not depends on two things. Depends on the level of negligence and it depends on what the statute is interpreted to cover. So there have been cases where statutes have been interpreted to apply to civil negligence, to any deviation from the reasonable and prudent person standard but those are the deep exceptions to the rule. Traditionally in criminal law, what is required to have liability under a negligence or recklessness standard is what the civil law would call gross negligence or gross recklessness. It has to be a substantial deviation from the standard of care. So a little deviation is traditionally subject to civil redress but not criminal wrongdoing. A big deviation from the standard of care will trigger criminal liability. So even a state that does not have a specific vehicular homicide law, if a person who is heavily intoxicated gets behind the wheel of a car, and kills somebody. That person will be guilty of involuntary manslaughter. On the other hand, a person who briefly looked away from the road, say to look at the person's child, and then causes an accident, has only committed a civil wrong. He hasn't committed a criminal wrong. So, traditionally, the dividing line between a crime and a tort is that a tort gets triggered any time there's a deviation from the reasonable and prudent person standard. A crime only gets triggered when the deviation is a big one.