Negligence per se is the legal doctrine whereby an act is considered negligent because it violates a statute (or regulation). In order to prove negligence

Negligence

Negligence is a failure to exercise the care that a reasonably prudent person would exercise in like circumstances. The area of tort law known as negligence involves harm caused by carelessness, not intentional harm.According to Jay M...

 per se, the plaintiff must show that

1. the defendant violated the statute,
2. the statute provides for a criminal penalty (i.e., fines or imprisonment) but not by civil penalties,
3. the act caused the kind of harm the statute was designed to prevent, and
4. the plaintiff was a member of the statute's protected class.

In some jurisdictions, negligence per se creates merely a presumption of negligence.

A typical example is one in which a contractor violates a building code when constructing a house. The house then collapses, injuring somebody. The violation of the building code establishes negligence per se and the contractor will be found liable, so long as the contractor's breach of the code was the cause (proximate cause

Proximate cause

In the law, a proximate cause is an event sufficiently related to a legally recognizable injury to be held the cause of that injury. There are two types of causation in the law, cause-in-fact and proximate cause. Cause-in-fact is determined by the "but-for" test: but for the action, the result...

 and actual cause) of the injury.

Further reading

• Restatement (Third) of Torts § 14 (Tentative Draft No. 1, March 28, 2001)
• Grable & Sons Metal Prods. v. Darue Eng'g & Mfg., 125 S. Ct. 2363, 2370 (2005).