directly below a public street and likes to put flower vases on the ledge of the second floor balcony, notwithstanding the fact that the county where the apartment is located is very windy most days of the year. One windy day Mr. B goes out for a walk and the flower vase belonging to Mr. a falls on him due to the wind. There is negligence on the part of Mr. A because reasonable foresight or even common sense dictates that a flower vase on a balcony ledge is not a very good idea.

Duty of care, a person must in his or her acts or omissions exercise that degree of diligence required in a particular situation. A person may be required to act with ordinary diligence in one act but required to exercise extraordinary diligence in another. For example a person in walking to work is required to exercise ordinary diligence to make sure he or she does not bump into anything by accident. However when operating a motor vehicle as a driver of a common carrier such as a passenger bus, the same person has to exercise extraordinary diligence. In both cases failure to act accordingly will lead to civil liability on accidents and/or damaged caused.

Cause and effect, means that the act or omission imputed must be directly linked or if not, must at least be imputable to the injury complained of. This means that the act or omission must be the proximate cause of the injury, or if not the proximate cause at least a remote cause of the injury. In the same example, while it can be said that the wind was the reason why the vase fell on Mr. B, it was still the act of Mr. A in leaving the vase on the balcony ledge that can reasonably be said to have caused the injury

In closing, accident claims UK can be summed up by the words of the House of Lords in the leading case of Donoghue v Stevenson [1932] UKHL 100 "A man has a Duty of Care to conduct himself in such a way as to avoid harm to others, where a reasonable man would have seen that such harm could occur".