Negligence law and analytics

- We're going to learn about negligence law in this video. Negligence law is state law. It is sourced in judge-made decisions, so it's common law, and it is relevant to all kinds of behavior, including personal behavior and business behavior. The thing that is really interesting about negligence law is that if you understand the basic elements of negligence, then you can see how it can be applied to any kind of behavior, and we'll see some examples of that, including behavior in data analytics and artificial intelligence and the management of data and use of that data. So the basic elements of any negligence claim are these four: duty, breach, causation and damages. The duty that we all have is the duty to act as a, quote, reasonable person under the circumstances. That means that we are to act carefully under the circumstances of whatever it is we're doing. For example, if you were driving an automobile, you are under a duty to drive that automobile reasonably under the circumstances of the day that you're driving, which may change. So on a day that is clear and sunny, it might be reasonable to drive the speed limit. On a day when it is cloudy or raining or there's storms, then it might not be reasonable to drive the speed limit. So the circumstances change, and it is ultimately the courts that decide what these duties are and how they're defined, which is why we read cases to understand the courts' interpretations in the various context. So we always are under a duty to act carefully. We breach that duty when we fail to act carefully. So if I'm driving a car, and I'm driving excessively over the speed limit on a day when it is cloudy and stormy, and I cause an accident, then I have failed to live up to my duty. I have breached my duty to act as a reasonable person under the circumstances. Causation is the link between that breach and the damages that are caused. It's a factual inquiry and also a legal inquiry, but it's basically looking to see that there is some connection between the failure to act reasonably and the harm that was caused. In negligence law, negligence is tort law, which basically is law that protects us from emotional, physical and financial harm. The damages are that. They can be physical, they can be emotional and in a business context, they can be largely financial. So these are the four basic elements of any negligence claim. Now, it's important to understand negligence because these can come up as claims in different context, including negligent product design, so we might talk later about, in the context of artificial intelligence and things like, you know, self-driving cars. Who designed that car? Who designed that vehicle? Was it designed carefully? Negligent product design can come up as a claim when a product is not designed carefully, and as a result, it causes harm to the person using the product. You can be negligent in hiring, so if companies are not careful in hiring, then they can be accused of negligent or careless hiring in the event that the person hired actually causes harm to another. Negligent distribution can be negligent distribution of products. If I'm a marketer and I'm distributing products, if I don't do so carefully, then I might cause harm and be responsible for that. We've seen these cases in allegations, for example, against gun manufacturers who might be distributing guns in areas where there is less regulation to their access, knowing that they might flood up into a black market and become more available, causing harm as a result of criminal activity in those places where the regulations were stricter. So, again, we can be careless doing anything: product design, hiring, distribution and, relevant to our course content here, negligent data collection or management. There can be a claim that the data broker, the data user is collecting information in a way that is not careful enough or that they're managing the information, sharing the information in a way that is not careful enough. So if we consider things like big data breaches. There's negligence there. Those are allegations of negligence as well as violations of other federal statutory law. But just in a carelessness realm, we need to be careful in how we collect, manage, use, share and so forth the data that we are accessing in data analytics and artificial intelligence.