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Concept
Reasonable person
Summary
In law, a reasonable person, reasonable man, or the man on the Clapham omnibus, is a hypothetical person of legal fiction crafted by the courts and communicated through case law and jury instructions.
Strictly according to the fiction, it is misconceived for a party to seek evidence from actual people to establish how the reasonable man would have acted or what he would have foreseen. This person's character and care conduct under any common set of facts, is decided through reasoning of good practice or policy—or "learned" permitting there is a compelling consensus of public opinion—by high courts.
In some practices, for circumstances arising from an uncommon set of facts, this person is seen to represent a composite of a relevant community's judgement as to how a typical member of said community should behave in situations that might pose a threat of harm (through action or inaction) to the public. However, cases resulting in judgment notwithstanding verdict can be examples where a vetted jury's composite judgment was deemed beyond that of the reasonable person, and thus overruled.
The reasonable person belongs to a family of hypothetical figures in law including: the "right-thinking member of society", the "officious bystander", the "reasonable parent", the "reasonable landlord", the "fair-minded and informed observer", the "person having ordinary skill in the art" in patent law, and stretching back to Roman jurists, the figure of the bonus pater familias, all used to define legal standards. While there is a loose consensus in black letter law, there is no accepted technical definition. As with legal fiction in general, it is somewhat susceptible to ad hoc manipulation or transformation, and hence the "reasonable person" is an emergent concept of common law. The "reasonable person" is used as a tool to standardize, teach law students, or explain the law to a jury.
As a legal fiction, the "reasonable person" is not an average person or a typical person, leading to great difficulties in applying the concept in some criminal cases, especially in regard to the partial defence of provocation.
Official source
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