Battery (tort)

At common law, battery is the tort of intentionally (or, in Australia, negligently) and voluntarily bringing about an unconsented harmful or offensive contact with a person or to something closely associated with them (e.g. a hat, a purse). Unlike assault, battery involves an actual contact. The contact can be by one person (the tortfeasor) of another (the victim), or the contact may be by an object brought about by the tortfeasor. For example, the intentional contact by a car is a battery.

Unlike criminal law, which recognizes degrees of various crimes involving physical contact, there is but a single tort of battery. Lightly flicking a person's ear is battery, as is severely beating someone with a tire iron. Neither is there a separate tort for a battery of a sexual nature. However, a jury hearing a battery case is free to assess higher damages for a battery in which the contact was particularly offensive or harmful.

Since it is practically impossible to avoid physical contact with others during everyday activities, everyone is presumed to consent to a certain amount of physical contact with others, such as when one person unavoidably brushes or bumps against another in a crowded lift, passage or stairway. However, physical contact may not be deemed as consented to if the acts that cause harm are prohibited acts.

Battery is a form of trespass to the person and as such no actual damage (e.g. injury) needs to be proved. Only proof of contact (with the appropriate level of intention or negligence) needs to be made. If there is an attempted battery, but no actual contact, that may constitute a tort of assault.

In the United States, the common law requires the contact for battery be "harmful or offensive." The offensiveness is measured against a reasonable person standard. Looking at a contact objectively, as a reasonable person would see it, would this contact be offensive? Thus, a hypersensitive person would fail on a battery action if jostled by fellow passengers on a subway, as this contact is expected in normal society and a reasonable person would not find it offensive. Harmful is defined by any physical damage to the body.

Battery need not require body-to-body contact. Touching an object "intimately connected" to a person (such as an object he or she is holding) can also be battery. Furthermore, a contact may constitute a battery even if there is a delay between the defendant's act and the contact to the plaintiff's injury. For example, where a person who digs a pit with the intent that another will fall into it later, or where a person who mixes something offensive in food that he knows another will eat, has committed a battery against that other when the other does in fact fall into the pit or eats the offensive matter.

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Wikipedia