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🎧 EPISODE SUMMARY 🎧

Intentional torts protect distinct interests and require precise analysis of the defendant’s mental state.

Intent generally exists when the defendant acts with the purpose of causing the legally relevant consequence or knows with substantial certainty that it will occur.

Intent differs from motive. A benevolent motive does not eliminate intentional-tort liability when the required intent exists.

Intent also differs from negligence and recklessness. Negligence involves unreasonable risk. Recklessness involves conscious disregard of substantial risk. Intent requires purpose or substantial certainty.

Mistake ordinarily does not eliminate intent when the defendant intended the act constituting the invasion. Children and persons with mental impairments may possess tort intent if they actually form the required mental state.

Transferred intent traditionally operates among battery, assault, false imprisonment, trespass to land, and trespass to chattels. Intent may transfer between victims and among those traditional torts.

Battery protects bodily integrity and dignity. It requires intent, harmful or offensive contact with the plaintiff’s person, and causation. Physical injury is unnecessary. Contact may be indirect and may involve objects intimately connected with the plaintiff.

Assault protects freedom from apprehension of imminent harmful or offensive contact. Apprehension means awareness, not fear. The plaintiff ordinarily must perceive the threat while it is imminent. Apparent ability may be sufficient even when actual ability is absent.

False imprisonment protects freedom of movement. It requires intended confinement within bounded limits, awareness or resulting harm, and causation. A known reasonable means of escape defeats complete confinement, but a dangerous, humiliating, hidden, or otherwise unreasonable route does not.

IIED requires extreme and outrageous conduct, intent or recklessness, causation, and severe emotional distress. Ordinary insults and annoyances generally do not suffice. Repetition, abuse of authority, exploitation of vulnerability, threats, and particularly vulnerable plaintiffs may make conduct more likely to qualify as outrageous.

The key lesson for Monday is that intentional-tort liability turns on the exact mental state and the exact interest invaded. Strong analysis does not ask merely whether the defendant acted intentionally. It asks what the defendant intended, what happened to the plaintiff, and which tort’s elements accurately describe that invasion.

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