Fault
How Minnesota apportions responsibility, and why being partly at fault is not the end of a claim.
Nothing on this page is advice about your situation, and no article can be. If you want your own facts looked at, a Minnesota personal injury attorney can do that.
It just happened
The first days. What to do, what not to say, and which clocks have already started.
- Claims against a city, county, or the state: the immunities come first, and the clock is short
Minnesota waived governmental immunity and then wrote the exceptions back in by statute. A claim against a public body has to survive a list of enumerated immunities, a damages cap, and a notice period that closes in 180 days.
Making the claim
Fault, thresholds, damages, and what the adjuster on the other end is actually doing.
- Comparative fault: being partly at fault is not the end of a claim
Minnesota bars a claim only when the claimant's fault is greater than the fault of the person they are suing. That comparison is made defendant by defendant, and the arithmetic runs in an order most people get backwards.
- The tort threshold: when a Minnesota crash claim can include pain and suffering
Minnesota closes off damages for noneconomic detriment in most motor vehicle cases unless one of five statutory gates opens. Four of them have nothing to do with a dollar figure, and the dollar figure is not the sum of the medical bills.
- Minnesota's dog bite statute: the two phrases that decide the case
Minn. Stat. § 347.22 makes a dog's owner liable without any showing of negligence, and the dog's history does not matter. Almost every contested Minnesota dog case turns instead on two phrases written into the statute itself.
- What a Minnesota property owner owes someone who comes onto the land
Minnesota stopped sorting entrants into licensees and invitees in 1972 and replaced the categories with one duty of reasonable care. Two things narrow that duty, and both of them are more qualified than they sound.
- What a traffic ticket proves: the rules of the road for people who are not in a car
Minnesota's traffic code says in terms that breaking it is not negligence per se. That one sentence changes what a citation, a crosswalk, and a bicycle's road position are worth in an injury claim — and the rules themselves say less than most people think.
- Snow, ice, and a fall: whose duty it is, and the amendment that narrowed the city's immunity
Minnesota gives a municipality an immunity for snow and ice, and most descriptions of it quote a version the legislature replaced in 1986. What survives is narrower than the reputation, and it turns on a single word: affirmatively.
When it goes wrong
Denials, lowball offers, disputed fault, and the deadlines that end a claim quietly.
- The release you are asked to sign, and what it gives up
A release is a contract, and the check is what you are paid for signing it. Minnesota law limits how far one may reach, refuses to let one defeat certain repayment rights, and requires a judge's approval before one binds a child.
Background
The statutes and doctrines the rest of the site refers back to.
- When more than one party is at fault: several liability, reallocation, and the settling defendant
Minnesota made several liability the general rule in 2003 and kept four exceptions. The Minnesota Supreme Court has since held that the rule applies even to a tortfeasor nobody sued, and that the statute's reallocation provision does not reach a severally liable defendant.