Reasonable Person - Rationale

Rationale

American jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. explained the theory behind the reasonable person standard as stemming from the impossibility of "measuring a man's powers and limitations." Individual, personal quirks inadvertently injuring the persons or property of others are no less damaging than intentional acts. For society to function, "a certain average of conduct, a sacrifice of individual peculiarities going beyond a certain point, is necessary to the general welfare." Thus, a reasonable application of the law is sought, compatible with planning, working, or getting along with others. As such, "his neighbors accordingly require him, at his proper peril, to come up to their standard, and the courts which they establish decline to take his personal equation into account."

The reasonable person standard is by no means democratic in its scope; it is, contrary to popular conception, intentionally distinct from that of the "average person," who is not necessarily guaranteed to always be reasonable. The reasonable person will weigh all of the following factors before acting:

• the foreseeable risk of harm his actions create versus the utility of his actions;
• the extent of the risk so created;
• the likelihood such risk will actually cause harm to others;
• any alternatives of lesser risk, and the costs of those alternatives.

Taking such actions requires the reasonable person to be appropriately informed, capable, aware of the law, and fair-minded. Such a person might do something extraordinary in certain circumstances, but whatever that person does or thinks, it is always reasonable.

The reasonable person has been called an "excellent but odious character."

He is an ideal, a standard, the embodiment of all those qualities which we demand of the good citizen ... invariably looks where he is going, ... is careful to examine the immediate foreground before he executes a leap or bound; ... neither stargazes nor is lost in meditation when approaching trapdoors or the margins of a dock; ... never mounts a moving and does not alight from any car while the train is in motion, ... uses nothing except in moderation, and even flogs his child in meditating only on the golden mean.

English legal scholar Percy Henry Winfield summarized much of the literature by observing that:

e has not the courage of Achilles, the wisdom of Ulysses or the strength of Hercules, nor has he the prophetic vision of a clairvoyant. He will not anticipate folly in all its forms but he never puts out of consideration the teachings of experience shows such negligence and so will guard against negligence of others when experience shows such negligence to be common. He is a reasonable man but not a perfect citizen, nor a "paragon of circumspection. ..."