united-states precedent
Is there a precedent for a lawsuit against someone for making a decision that goes against public health?
<p>So I live in a city that has these organizers who are newspaper owners that are about to go forward with a huge event that brings people from all over despite the fact that I just saw the coronavirus numbers increase by 18 in the past 24 hours here in the United States.</p>

<p>If this event results in an outbreak in my city, is there a legal precedent for a lawsuit against these organizers? Has anything like this been done before?</p>

<p>The CDC isn't advising such bans, so your "goes against public health" is already hard to prove. The next thing would be to prove that it's not the organizer, the state or the Federal government which should stop the event, but the local community. And you'd have to prove that they reasonably should know the CDC was wrong (!).</p>

<p>Finally, the question of sovereign immunity comes up. This would ordinarily be irrelevant for local governments, but usually local governments don't have the power to ban such events anyway. The freedom to assemble is a First Amendment freedom; local government would likely need to be implementing Federal law to override that freedom. And in that case, the municipal government <em>does</em> fall under Federal sovereign immunity.</p>

<p>So all in all, it looks like a certain win for the city, but the technical question <em>how</em> they win depends on the details of the lawsuit.</p>

<p>Lawsuits are only allowed for harms to a particular private individual's health that actually arises from the conduct of the person sued. You can't sue because there was an outbreak in your city, you have to show individualized harm to you.</p>

<p>To prevail you would have to make out a "negligence" claim. The elements of this claim are (1) a duty, (2) that was breached, (3) by someone with injuries, (4) that were caused by the breach of duty.</p>

<p>There are two kinds of duties. One is the general duty to use the care of a reasonable person to prevent foreseeable harm to others (a breach of this duty is called "negligence"). The other is to obey statutes and regulations and ordinances intended to protect people like the person injured from the harm suffered.</p>

<p>If someone doesn't violate a statute, regulation, or ordinance, then one has to show that it as negligent to carry out the event.</p>

<p>There would also be an affirmative defense that the fault was entirely that of the victim by attending the event knowing of the risk.</p>

<p>I wouldn't rule out negligence liability for event organizers, but it is more likely that they would be sued not for holding the event, but for failure to use reasonable care in how it was conducted (e.g. not having face masks and hand sanitizer on hand).</p>
