Personal injury

Personal injury is a legal term for an injury to the body, mind, or emotions, as opposed to an injury to property. In common law jurisdictions the term is most commonly used to refer to a type of tort lawsuit in which the person bringing the suit (the "claimant" in English Law or "plaintiff" in American jurisdictions) has suffered harm to his or her body or mind. Personal injury lawsuits are filed against the person or entity that caused the harm through negligence, gross negligence, reckless conduct, or intentional misconduct, and in some cases on the basis of strict liability. Different jurisdictions describe the damages (or, the things for which the injured person may be compensated) in different ways, but damages typically include the injured person's medical bills, pain and suffering, and diminished quality of life. Historically, personal injury lawsuits in tort for monetary damages were virtually nonexistent before the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century. In agrarian, pre-industrial societies where most people did not travel far from home during their lifetimes, accidental bodily injuries inflicted by one stranger upon another were quite rare. When a grievous accident did occur, the culprit was usually a relative or close friend, and part of the same small local community. Most persons were judgment proof before the rise of the middle class and the invention of modern liability insurance. At common law, a victim of a personal injury and others with a direct interest in the outcome of an action (e.g., the victim's spouse) were automatically disqualified from testifying about the injury or its consequences (because the victim's self-interest in recovery was seen as inevitably resulting in an unacceptably high risk of perjury). Finally, pre-industrial injuries lacked the sheer magnitude of force of modern personal injuries, because they were normally inflicted by humans or animals, not powerful machines. Another obstacle was that if an injury was severe enough to kill the victim, the common law followed the maxim actio personalis moritur cum persona.