Tort and personal injury law is the part of civil law that lets you recover money when another person’s conduct harms you. Tort law is the broader framework covering any civil wrong that gives rise to a right to sue; personal injury law is the subset that applies when the harm is to your body or mental health rather than purely to property or finances. The rules below shape every claim from the moment you’re hurt through the final payout: how fault is proved, what counts as a recoverable loss, what the IRS and your health insurer take out of your check, and how long you have to act before the courthouse door closes.
What a Tort Is
A tort is a civil wrong where one person’s conduct causes harm to another, and the law makes the wrongdoer financially responsible. Criminal law and tort law can both respond to the same incident, but they aim at different things. A criminal case punishes the offender on behalf of the state. A tort case compensates you for your specific losses. Someone who punches you in a bar can be prosecuted for assault and separately sued by you for medical bills and pain, and the two proceedings run on separate tracks.
The proof standards reflect that split. Criminal prosecution requires proof beyond a reasonable doubt. A tort claim only requires preponderance of the evidence, meaning the defendant was more likely than not responsible.1Cornell Law Institute. Burden of Proof You’re asking a court to shift money between private parties, not to lock someone up, so the bar sits lower. Most tort cases resolve through a negotiated settlement rather than a trial verdict.
Personal Injury as a Subset of Tort Law
People use “tort law” and “personal injury law” as if they mean the same thing. They don’t. Tort law covers plenty of situations without any physical harm: defamation, interference with a business relationship, trespass to land. A neighbor who cuts down a tree on your property committed a tort, but no one was injured.
Personal injury law is the slice of tort law that applies when a person suffers physical harm, emotional trauma, or psychological injury. A car crash that gives you whiplash is both a tort and a personal injury case. The same crash that only dents your bumper is a tort but not a personal injury case. The practical difference is that personal injury claims open the door to damages for pain, suffering, and emotional distress that pure property claims don’t. Most personal injury attorneys work on contingency, taking a percentage of the recovery (typically around a third) rather than billing hourly, which removes the upfront cost of pursuing a claim.
The Three Categories of Torts
Every tort fits into one of three categories based on what the defendant was doing and thinking when the harm occurred.
Intentional Torts
An intentional tort happens when someone acts with the purpose of causing a harmful result, or with near-certainty that it will occur. Battery, where someone makes unwanted physical contact that injures you, is the classic example. False imprisonment, where someone confines you without legal authority, is another. Because the defendant chose to cause harm, courts often impose additional financial penalties beyond basic compensation.
Negligence
Negligence drives the vast majority of personal injury cases. Everyone owes a basic level of caution to the people around them, and when someone falls short of that standard and causes injury, they’re financially responsible. A driver running a stop sign, a store owner ignoring a puddle at the entrance, a doctor misreading a scan all fit the pattern. Nobody set out to cause harm, but the failure to act carefully enough did.
Strict Liability
Strict liability holds a defendant responsible regardless of intent or caution. It typically applies to inherently dangerous activities such as blasting with explosives, and to defective products. If a power tool injures you because of a manufacturing flaw, you don’t have to prove the manufacturer was careless. You only have to show the product was defective and that the defect caused your injury.
Who Else Can Be Liable
The person who directly caused the injury isn’t always the only one who pays. Under respondeat superior, an employer can be held liable when an employee causes harm while performing job duties. The test is whether the employer had the right to control how the work was done. A delivery driver who causes an accident during deliveries exposes both the driver and the employer to a claim. This matters because employers typically carry far more insurance than individual employees. The doctrine generally doesn’t reach independent contractors, where the hiring party lacks day-to-day control over how the work gets done.
The Four Elements of a Negligence Claim
Because negligence is where most claims live, the four elements are worth knowing in order. Drop any one of them and the claim fails.
- Duty of care. The defendant had a legal obligation to act with reasonable caution toward you. Drivers owe this to others on the road, property owners to visitors, doctors to patients. No duty, nothing to breach.
- Breach. The defendant failed to meet that standard. Breach is usually shown by comparing what the defendant did against what a reasonably careful person would have done in the same situation.
- Causation. The breach actually caused your injury. Courts split this into two parts. Cause-in-fact asks whether your injury would have happened without the defendant’s conduct, the “but-for” test. Proximate cause asks whether the harm was a reasonably foreseeable result of the conduct; a bizarre chain of events can be found too remote.2Legal Information Institute. But-for Test
- Damages. You suffered actual, measurable harm. Even clear negligence goes nowhere without provable losses: medical expenses, lost income, pain, or other concrete harm that money can address.
When Fault Is Shared
Accidents rarely feature one person doing everything wrong. The rule your state uses to handle shared fault directly controls what you collect.
Most states apply some form of comparative negligence, which reduces your award by your percentage of fault. If a jury finds your total damages are $100,000 and you were 30% at fault, you collect $70,000. Two variations exist. Under pure comparative negligence, you can recover something even if you were 99% at fault, though the award shrinks accordingly: a plaintiff 90% responsible for a $100,000 loss collects $10,000. Under modified comparative negligence, recovery is cut off above a threshold, either 50% or 51% depending on the state. Cross that line and you get nothing.3Legal Information Institute. Comparative Negligence
A handful of states still follow pure contributory negligence, which is far harsher. Any fault on your part, even 1%, bars recovery entirely. This rule gives insurance adjusters strong leverage in borderline cases, so knowing which system your state uses before you negotiate is critical.
Common Defenses
Beyond arguing shared fault, defendants have other tools, and assumption of risk is the main one. Express assumption of risk involves a written agreement. If you signed a liability waiver before skydiving and broke your leg on a normal jump, that waiver may block your suit against the operator. Waivers aren’t absolute. Courts throw them out when they’re poorly written, cover risks beyond the scope of the activity, or violate public policy, and they don’t protect a defendant whose reckless or intentional conduct caused the harm.
Implied assumption of risk operates without any signed document. A spectator hit by a foul ball at a baseball game generally accepted that inherent risk by attending. The defense breaks down when the danger goes beyond what’s ordinary for the activity: a spectator assumes the risk of foul balls, not a collapsing bleacher. It also doesn’t apply to hidden hazards or to cases where the defendant violated a safety statute.
Types of Damages
The point of a tort claim is to turn harm into a dollar figure that makes you as close to whole as money can manage. Damages come in three categories, and the distinctions affect both what you pursue and what you keep.
Economic Damages
Economic damages cover losses that can be proved with documentation: medical bills, lost wages, rehabilitation costs, and future earnings you’ll never receive because of a long-term disability. These are calculated from hospital records, pay stubs, and expert projections. Most states don’t cap economic damages, treating them as objective, verifiable costs the defendant created.
Non-Economic Damages
Non-economic damages compensate for harm that doesn’t come with a receipt: physical pain, emotional distress, loss of enjoyment of life, and the strain an injury puts on your relationships. Because these losses are subjective, roughly two dozen states cap non-economic damages in medical malpractice cases, and approximately nine states extend caps to general personal injury claims. Dollar thresholds vary widely. These caps can meaningfully cut your recovery even when a jury believes you deserve more.
Punitive Damages
Punitive damages exist to punish a defendant whose conduct was especially reckless or malicious, not to compensate you. A trucking company that knowingly puts a driver with a suspended license on the road, or a manufacturer that conceals a deadly defect, might face punitive damages on top of what they owe for actual losses. Courts award them sparingly, and many states cap them or tie the amount to a multiple of compensatory damages.
The Collateral Source Rule
The collateral source rule generally prevents a defendant from reducing your award by pointing out that your health insurance already covered your medical bills.4Legal Information Institute. Collateral Source Rule The reasoning is that the defendant shouldn’t benefit from the foresight you showed in carrying coverage. Several states have modified the rule through tort reform, letting defendants introduce evidence of insurance payments in certain circumstances, so the protection isn’t universal.
Tax Treatment of Settlements
What the IRS takes depends on what the money compensates. Damages for physical injuries or physical sickness are excluded from gross income under federal tax law, meaning you keep the full amount without owing income tax.5Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 26 USC 104 – Compensation for Injuries or Sickness Emotional distress damages flowing directly from a physical injury get the same tax-free treatment.
The exceptions matter. Punitive damages are fully taxable as ordinary income regardless of whether your underlying case involved physical injuries, reported on Schedule 1. Emotional distress damages not tied to a physical injury are taxable, except to the extent they reimburse medical treatment of that distress. And if you deducted injury-related medical expenses in a prior tax year and later receive a settlement covering those same expenses, you owe tax on the portion that produced a prior tax benefit.6Internal Revenue Service. Settlements – Taxability Getting the allocation right between taxable and non-taxable categories at the time of settlement can save you thousands.
Liens and Subrogation
Winning a settlement doesn’t always mean pocketing the full amount. If your health insurer paid for treatment related to your injury, it may have a legal right to recover those payments from your settlement through subrogation. Employer-sponsored health plans governed by federal law can enforce repayment by placing a lien on specific recovery funds. The plan’s written terms typically control whether the insurer shares in your attorney’s fees and whether it can recover before you’ve been made financially whole.
Hospitals in many states can file their own liens directly against your pending recovery, which prevents your attorney from distributing settlement funds until the hospital’s charges are addressed. These liens must generally be filed with a court clerk within a set period after treatment, must accurately identify the patient and the accident, and must credit any amounts already paid by insurance. The lien is limited to what the hospital actually charged for treatment of the specific injury. Procedural errors can invalidate the lien, so reviewing any medical lien with your attorney before accepting a settlement is worth the effort.
Filing Deadlines
Every personal injury claim carries a statute of limitations, and missing it ends the case regardless of how strong the evidence is. The deadlines run from one year to six years depending on the state and the type of claim. There is no single national deadline, which makes identifying the correct window one of the first things to do after an injury.
The discovery rule can extend the clock when the injury wasn’t immediately apparent. It pauses the limitations period until the date you knew, or reasonably should have known, that you were injured and that someone else’s conduct may have caused it. This comes up often in medical malpractice, where a misdiagnosis or surgical error may not produce symptoms for months or years. The “reasonably should have known” language carries a duty to investigate: if obvious warning signs appeared and you ignored them, a court may start the clock from the date those signs appeared.
Even the discovery rule has limits. Many states impose a statute of repose, an absolute outer deadline measured from the date of the harmful act. Once that date passes, no amount of delayed discovery can revive the claim. Repose periods vary by state and claim type, which is why prompt legal consultation matters whenever you suspect a past procedure or product exposure caused a new problem.
Claims Against the Government
Suing a government entity is possible but comes with rules that surprise people. The federal government waives sovereign immunity for many tort claims under the Federal Tort Claims Act, but the process differs sharply from an ordinary lawsuit. You must first file an administrative claim in writing with the responsible federal agency within two years of the date the claim accrued.7Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 28 USC 2401 – Time for Commencing Action Against United States The claim must include a specific dollar amount. Only after the agency denies your claim, or fails to respond within six months, can you file suit in federal court.
Two restrictions apply. The federal government cannot be held liable for punitive damages or prejudgment interest, however egregious the conduct.8Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 28 USC 2674 – Liability of United States And accepting a settlement offer extinguishes your right to sue over the same incident, so evaluating any offer carefully before agreeing is essential.
State and local government claims follow a parallel but separate framework. Most states require you to file a notice of claim with the government entity before bringing suit, and the deadline for that notice is often much shorter than the general statute of limitations. Some states require notice within 90 days of the injury. Missing the notice window typically bars the claim entirely, even if the underlying statute of limitations hasn’t expired. If your injury involves a government vehicle, a public road, a government building, or a government employee, identifying the notice requirement immediately should be the first step.
When the Injury Is Fatal
When a tort causes death rather than injury, the legal landscape changes. Wrongful death claims let surviving family members recover for their own losses from the death: lost financial support, lost companionship, funeral expenses, and the expected future income the deceased would have earned.9Legal Information Institute. Wrongful Death State statutes decide who can bring these claims, typically limiting standing to spouses, children, and parents, though some states extend eligibility to siblings and other dependents.
A survival action is related but distinct. Instead of compensating the family for their losses, it continues the claim the deceased would have had if they survived. It covers the pain and suffering the person experienced before dying, medical costs incurred during treatment, and other damages accumulated between injury and death. In some states, the estate brings the survival action while a family member brings the wrongful death claim, and both can proceed at the same time from the same incident. Damages and deadlines differ between the two, so families dealing with a fatal injury need to understand which claims apply and act quickly on each.