Civil Liability and Torts

When You Must Pay for Harm

Civil liability answers one question: who bears the cost of a harm? Two doors lead there:

• Contractual liability: you breached an obligation you had agreed to — the late builder, the defective delivery. The contract itself defines the duty.
• Extracontractual (tort) liability: no contract links you to the victim, but the general duty not to harm others does. Its charter is article 1902 of the Civil Code: whoever by action or omission causes damage to another, with fault or negligence, must repair the damage caused.

The three elements of art. 1902 — all must hold, like a circuit in series:

Key idea: Liability needs all three at once — fault, damage, and causation. If any one is missing, there is no liability.

• Fault or negligence: the defendant fell below the diligence of a reasonable person (or acted intentionally). No blameworthy conduct, no liability — accidents without negligence stay where they fall.
• Damage: a real, provable harm — property loss, personal injury, lost profits (lucro cesante) alongside actual loss (daño emergente), even moral damage.
• Causation: the conduct must have caused the damage; an unforeseeable intervening event (force majeure, the victim's own act) breaks the chain.

Knock any element out and the claim collapses: careless conduct that hurt no one owes nothing; a terrible harm nobody's negligence produced compensates no one.

Business exposures: an employer answers for employees' torts in the course of their work (vicarious liability); a manufacturer for defective products under strict-liability rules — there, fault drops out of the formula and insurance becomes the rational response. Pricing these risks — probability × magnitude — is where law meets managerial arithmetic.

The two doors to liability

Tip: In practice courts increasingly ease the victim's burden: in risky activities, fault is presumed and the defendant must prove diligence — a quiet shift toward objective liability.