Arizona Negligence Law — What Does It Mean for Your Case?

You hear the word “negligence” thrown around constantly in the legal world. But what does it actually mean for your case? In Arizona personal injury law, negligence is the foundation of almost every car accident, slip and fall, and injury claim. If you can prove it, you can recover compensation. If you can’t, you walk away with nothing.

The Four Elements of Negligence

To win a negligence claim in Arizona, you must prove all four of these elements:

1. Duty. The defendant owed you a duty of care. On the road, every driver has a duty to operate their vehicle safely and follow traffic laws. A property owner has a duty to maintain reasonably safe conditions. A doctor has a duty to provide competent medical care.

2. Breach. The defendant breached that duty by failing to act as a reasonably prudent person would under the same circumstances. Running a red light is a breach. Texting while driving is a breach. Failing to clean up a spill in a store aisle is a breach.

3. Causation. The defendant’s breach actually caused your injuries. This has two parts: “but-for” causation (your injury would not have happened but for the defendant’s conduct) and “proximate” causation (your injury was a foreseeable result of the defendant’s conduct).

4. Damages. You suffered actual, compensable harm — medical bills, lost wages, pain and suffering, property damage. Without damages, there’s no case even if the defendant was clearly negligent.

The Revised Arizona Jury Instructions (RAJIs) — which are the standard instructions judges give to juries in Arizona — lay this out clearly. The jury is told that negligence is “the failure to use reasonable care,” and that reasonable care is “that degree of care which a reasonably careful person would use under like circumstances.”

Comparative Fault in Arizona

Arizona follows a pure comparative fault system under A.R.S. § 12-2505. This means your recovery is reduced by your percentage of fault, but never eliminated entirely. If a jury finds you 30% at fault and the defendant 70% at fault on a $100,000 case, you recover $70,000.

This is more favorable than many states, which bar recovery entirely if you’re more than 50% at fault. In Arizona, even a plaintiff who is 99% at fault can technically recover 1% of their damages. The insurance company will try to maximize your share of fault to reduce what they owe. That’s why having an attorney who can effectively argue causation and fault allocation matters.

Negligence Per Se

There’s a shortcut in some cases called “negligence per se.” If the defendant violated a statute or regulation designed to protect people like you, and that violation caused your injury, the defendant is automatically considered negligent. You don’t have to prove what a “reasonable person” would have done — the law already set that standard and the defendant broke it.

Common examples in Arizona include running a red light (violation of A.R.S. § 28-645), texting while driving (violation of A.R.S. § 28-914), and DUI (violation of A.R.S. § 28-1381).

How Negligence Applies to Your Case

If you were injured in a car accident, a slip and fall, a dog bite, or any other incident caused by someone else’s carelessness, you likely have a negligence claim. The Law Badgers analyze every case through this four-element framework and build the evidence to prove each one. That’s what trial lawyers do.