text: A water district employee brought a child to an active irrigation maintenance site where multiple pieces of mechanical equipment were in operation. Clear warning signs indicated hazardous conditions and restricted access. The machinery remained running during a brief period when the employee's attention was diverted, and the child made contact with moving parts.

rationale: The plaintiff possessed actual knowledge of the specific hazard and nature of the site operations. The child's presence was voluntary and the risk was open and obvious. No affirmative inducement or misrepresentation of danger occurred.

difficulty: medium

edge_case_axes:
unusual defendant relationship
fringe wording but normal English

source_name: CourtListener

license_notes: Collected from CourtListener API. Verify source-specific restrictions; do not redistribute copied excerpts beyond what the license/terms allow.

review_status: unreviewed


text: A property manager (not the owner) permitted derelict machinery to remain in an unfenced lot adjacent to a residential area. The machinery lacked warning signs. A child entered the lot and was injured by the machinery's exposed parts. The property owner was absent and unaware of the machinery's presence.

rationale: Hazardous condition on land that would attract children, but liability is complicated by the property manager (not owner) creating the condition without owner knowledge.

difficulty: hard


text: A social establishment in State X failed to maintain proper emergency lighting in its rear exit corridor as required by State X Building Standards Code §402.3, which mandated illumination of at least 5 foot-candles. A patron departed during operating hours and fell on the unlighted stairs, suffering injuries.

rationale: Violation of a building code statute creates negligence per se; the defendant's failure to comply with the lighting requirement constitutes negligence as a matter of law regardless of subjective intent or care measures.

difficulty: easy


text: A vendor at a public market sold a food item to a customer. The customer consumed the item, experienced minor discomfort, and decided to drive to a medical facility six miles away. While driving, the customer encountered an unrelated traffic jam, became impatient, took an unfamiliar shortcut through an unmarked residential area, and collided with another vehicle. The food vendor played no role in vehicle operation, route selection, traffic conditions, or the collision.

rationale: The causal chain is broken by independent human decisions and external events. The vendor's sale, even if it caused minor discomfort, was not proximate cause of injuries resulting from a collision requiring multiple intervening causes: patient's independent decision to drive, voluntary route choice, traffic conditions, and third-party driver conduct.

edge_case_axes:
intervening cause
mixed factual causation


text: A store employee failed to properly secure stacked merchandise near a checkout counter. While a customer observed the unstable stack and altered their walking route to avoid it, this gait adjustment placed unusual stress on a pre-existing lumbar condition that the customer had been managing asymptomatically. The customer's back injury manifested during checkout and was attributed by medical experts to the combination of gait modification and spinal vulnerability, with no definitive determination of which factor was predominant.

rationale: Negligence exists in improper stacking. However, proximate cause is complicated by the plaintiff's successful avoidance of the hazard itself and injury resulting indirectly from gait modification combined with pre-existing condition. The foreseeability of this causation chain is questionable and relative contribution is medically indeterminate.


text: During surgical closure following abdominal surgery at a regional medical facility, a surgical retractor remained lodged in the patient's abdomen. Weeks later, the patient experienced complications and the instrument was discovered. Standard operative protocols require systematic counting and inventory of instruments before closure. No documented explanation accounts for the instrument's presence. Retained surgical objects do not typically occur in properly conducted procedures.

rationale: The fact of a retained surgical instrument speaks itself to negligence; such retained foreign bodies are not consistent with proper operative technique and permit inference of negligence without direct evidence.


text: A funeral home contracted with an independent electrical service company to upgrade wiring in the preparation area. Two weeks post-completion, a municipal power transformer located one city block away experienced catastrophic failure, sending a voltage surge through connected buildings including the funeral home. The surge ignited a fire in the recently installed wiring system. The contractor's inspection reports show workmanship below industry standard, but investigation also determined that surge-suppression equipment—not mandated by local code at that time—would likely have prevented fire regardless of the contractor's installation quality. The intervening transformer failure occurred without warning.

rationale: Multiple independent causal factors (substandard workmanship and municipal power failure); temporal gap between alleged negligence and injury; arguable intervening cause breaking chain of causation; unresolved whether proximate cause exists under jurisdiction's foreseeability standard versus direct-cause approach.

difficulty: adversarial

edge_case_axes:
jurisdiction ambiguity
intervening cause
mixed factual causation


text: A funeral home failed to maintain proper temperature control in the preparation room as required by Section 10-B of the state funeral conduct code. During a three-day period in July, the temperature exceeded the regulatory maximum by eight degrees, resulting in accelerated decomposition of a body before the scheduled service, which prevented visual identification by family members.

rationale: Clear violation of specific statutory requirement establishing duty and standard of care. The regulation itself defines negligence; no need to prove breach of reasonable care standard separately.