Dog Bites Injuries
Dog bite law is a unique combination of city and county ordinances, state statutory law, state case law (i.e., legal principles that result from specific lawsuits within the state), and common law (i.e., legal principles resulting from specific lawsuits from throughout the United States, usually as reported in authoritative legal works such as the Restatement of Law).
Broadly
speaking, all states hold a person responsible for a
dog bite if the person
ordered or made the dog attack the victim, or if the person
knowingly
kept a dog
that previously bit a person or exhibited a tendency
or intention to someday bite a person.
Additionally,
almost all states make a person legally liable for
negligence that results in any injury caused by a
dog, and violating a public health and safety law
such as a leash law or a prohibition against dogs
running at large if it lead to the dog bite. Some
states refer to the doctrine of premises liability
when the victim is harmed on the dog owner's
property, but the basis of liability nevertheless is
grounded upon negligence. All of these principles
apply to
bites as well as
non-bite injuries.
You might also note that, most American states
and the states of New Jersey and Pennsylvania, as
well, have passed statutes
which create liability in the absence of the
traditional requirements for legal responsibility.
These dog bite statutes vary widely. They may impose liability upon whomever had custody of the dog as well as its owner, apply to non-bite injuries as well as bites, limit their scope to only the victim's medical bills, or provide for additional compensation if the dog previously bit a person. While the majority of dog bite statutes impose strict liability based on ownership of the dog, a number combine concepts of negligence, common law strict liability, and/or violations of local law, sometimes causing great confusion even in the courts.
The usual defenses to dog bite claims are that the victim provoked the dog, was a trespasser, was negligent, consciously assumed the risk of being bitten, or was a canine professional who was deemed to assume the risk. When the victim is a child, another defense is that his parent negligently failed to supervise him, and therefore was a cause of the accident (however, this defense is usually limited to an extreme lapse of supervision on the part of the parent). Because they are based on state statutes or judicial decisions, the defenses are different from state to state; furthermore, any particular defense might not apply in a specific case because of the particulars of the law in the jurisdiction where the incident happened.
At the Law Offices of Vincent J. Ciecka, P.C. we highly specialize and been very successful in obtaining high recoveries in dog or animal bites injury related cases. If you have a situation where you or someone you know might be a victim of this type of injury due to the negligence of someone else, please contact us as soon as possible to discuss your specifics and help you determine if indeed you have a case so you can obtain due compensation for such injuries.
