What is the voluntary-undertaking doctrine?

Negligence: Duty

Answer the following questions.

1. Is there a common law duty to rescue someone in distress?

a.      
Under what conditions does such a duty exist? Give an example.

2. What is the voluntary-undertaking doctrine?

3. How does the duty of a public entity compare to that of a private individual?

4. What is the doctrine of respondeat superior?

5. Finally, analyze a verse you find in the Bible in which God establishes a duty to avoid causing personal    injury.

Matthew 7:12 (New International Version) – “So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets.”

“biblical tort laws also parallel modern counterparts with respect to certain related distinctions and “elements,” as well as underlying concerns, values, or purposes that the laws serve to effectuate. These elements appear to have included: a duty of care, or a duty to avoid harming others or their property; It would seem that in order to state a claim in tort under biblical law, the plaintiff must have been able to show that the other party had a duty of care as to the plaintiff’s interests and somehow breached that duty. The underlying values implicit in these biblical laws seem to have included the belief that members of the community were entitled to bodily integrity, to be free from being harmed by others and to be free from actions by others resulting in loss of or damage to their property. Implicitly, each member of the community had a duty of care,173 namely, to avoid acting in ways that could foreseeably injure others or damage their property.”

Richard H. Hiers, Ancient Laws, Yet Strangely Modern: Biblical Contract and Tort Jurisprudence, 88 U. Det. Mercy L. Rev. 473 (2011) https://scholarship.law.ufl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1265&context=facultypub