The Arrangement of the Law DUTIES OF HOLDERS AND UNDERTAKERS A person who holds a thing of another's, e.g., a tenant or bailee, owes various duties to other persons who
have rights in it, corresponding to their rights, as to the care and use of the thing and its restoration to its owner.
A person who undertakes to do some thing for another and actually enters
upon the performance owes certain duties to use care to do it properly, about which the authorities are not entirely harmonious. This duty cor responds to various rights according to the nature of the undertaking, sometimes to the right of pecuniary condition.
The difference and the relation be tween rights and duties can be otherwise expressed as follows. Law is a system of rules for conduct; it commands or forbids acts. The acts are defined by reference to their consequences, the
consequences being the only things of intrinsic mportance. Those conse quences consist in of fact. To define of fact which may alterations which
alterations in states the acts, the states be affected and the may be made in
them must be described.
That is the
only way in which it is possible to define acts for legal purposes. There are certain states of fact and certain alterations in them which have to be
described in the definitions of various different kinds of acts, various duties. Therefore it is more convenient to describe them once for all in a separate
place and merely to refer to them in defining the duties. The definition of a protected right is, therefore, merely
a part of the definition of a duty, or of several duties, of acts commanded or
forbidden,
separated
from
the
rest
of the definition for convenience to avoid the necessity of repetition. Actu ally the states of fact are the things that
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are ultimately and intrinsically im por'tant; but for formal legal purposes conduct, duties, is the ultimate con ception, and states of fact, rights, are defined only as an aid in defining conduct or duties. From the foregoing analysis the nature of a legal wrong-—t'.e., a civil injury, crimes follow somewhat differ ent rules-can be made apparent. The elements of a wrong are as follows; unless they are all present there is no
wrong:-— (1) There must be a breach of duty.
A violation of right without any breach of duty is damnum absque injuria. (2) There must be a violation of right. No one can treat a breach of duty as a
wrong against him unless some right of his is thereby violated. (3) The breach of duty must be the actual and
the proximate cause of the violation of right. Occasionally a plaintiff fails in his suit because he cannot prove this necessary relation of actual causa
tion; often he fails because the injury is only a legally remote, though an actual, consequence of the defendant's conduct. (4) The duty and the right must correspond with each other. The want of this correspondence is generally expressed by saying that the violation of the right is not a proximate conse
quence of the breach of duty. In Anthony v.5la12i, 11 Metc. 290, the plaintifi had contracted with a town to support a pauper for a year for a
fixed price. The defendant beat the pauper and made him sick, whereby the plaintifi was put to expense in
curing him. It was held that the plaintiff could not recover, because the damage to him was remote. It is submitted it was a sequence. mitted, is
that it was proximate enough; natural and probable con The true reason, it is sub that, the plaintiff having no
