In law, a reasonable person or reasonable man is a hypothetical person whose character and care conduct, under any common set of facts, is decided through reasoning of good practice or policy. It is a legal fiction crafted by the courts and communicated through case law and jury instructions. In some practices, for circumstances arising from an uncommon set of facts, this person represents a composite of a relevant community's judgment as to how a typical member of that community should behave in situations that might pose a threat of harm (through action or inaction) to the public. The reasonable person is used as a tool to standardize, teach law students, or explain the law to a jury. The reasonable person belongs to a family of hypothetical figures in law including: the "right-thinking member of society", the "officious bystander", the "reasonable parent", the "reasonable landlord", the "fair-minded and informed observer", the "person having ordinary skill in the art" in patent law. Ancient predecessors of the reasonable person include the bonus pater familias (the good family father) of ancient Rome, the bonus vir (the good man) and spoudaios (the earnest person) in ancient Greece as well as the geru maa (the silent person) in ancient Egypt. While there is a loose consensus on its meaning in black letter law, there is no accepted technical definition, and the "reasonable person" is an emergent concept of common law. The reasonable person is not an average person or a typical person, leading to difficulties in applying the concept in some criminal cases, especially in regard to the partial defence of provocation. Most recently, Valentin Jeutner has argued that it matters less whether the reasonable person is reasonable, officious or diligent but rather that the most important characteristic of the reasonable person is that they are another person. As with legal fiction in general, it is somewhat susceptible to ad hoc manipulation or transformation. Strictly according to the fiction, it is misconceived for a party to seek evidence from actual people to establish how someone would have acted or what he would have foreseen. However, changes in the standard may be "learned" by high courts over time if there is a compelling consensus of public opinion. The standard also holds that each person owes a duty to behave as a reasonable person would under the same or similar circumstances. While the specific circumstances of each case will require varying kinds of conduct and degrees of care, the reasonable person standard undergoes no variation itself. The standard does not exist independently of other circumstances within a case that could affect an individual's judgement. In cases resulting in judgment notwithstanding verdict, a vetted jury's composite judgment can be deemed beyond that of the reasonable person, and thus overruled. The "reasonable person" construct can be found applied in many areas of the law. The standard performs a crucial role in determining negligence in both criminal law—that is, criminal negligence—and tort law. The standard is also used in contract law, to determine contractual intent, or (when there is a duty of care) whether there has been a breach of the standard of care. The intent of a party can be determined by examining the understanding of a reasonable person, after consideration is given to all relevant circumstances of the case including the negotiations, any practices the parties have established between themselves, usages and any subsequent conduct of the parties. During the Nuremberg Trials, Sir David Maxwell Fyfe introduced the standard of the reasonable person to international law. Nowadays known as the standard of the 'reasonable military commander', international courts use it to assess the conduct of military officers in times of war.
History The "reasonable man" appeared in Richard Hooker's defence of conservatism in religion, the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (1594-7), where he preferred Papists to Turks and accepted the opinions of religious experts when there was no reason to dissent. In 1835, Adolphe Quetelet detailed the characteristics of l'homme moyen (French, "average man"). His work is translated into English several ways. As a result, some authors pick "average man", "common man", "reasonable man", or stick to the original "l'homme moyen". Quetelet was a Belgian astronomer, mathematician, statistician and sociologist. He documented the physical characteristics of man on a statistical basis and discussed man's motivations when acting in society. Two years later, the "reasonable person" made his first appearance in the English case of Vaughan v. Menlove (1837). In Menlove, the defendant had stacked hay on his rental property in a manner prone to spontaneous ignition. After he had been repeatedly warned over the course of five weeks, the hay ignited and burned the defendant's barns and stable and then spread to the landlord's two cottages on the adjacent property. Menlove's attorney admitted his client's "misfortune of not possessing the highest order of intelligence," arguing that negligence should only be found if the jury decided Menlove had not acted with "bona fide [and] to the best of his [own] judgment." The Menlove court disagreed, reasoning that such a standard would be too subjective, instead preferring to set an objective standard for adjudicating cases:
The care taken by a prudent man has always been the rule laid down; and as to the supposed difficulty of applying it, a jury has always been able to say, whether, taking that rule as their guide, there has been negligence on the occasion in question. Instead, therefore, of saying that the liability for negligence should be co-extensive with the judgment of each individual, which would be as variable as the length of the foot of each individual, we ought rather to adhere to the rule which requires in all cases a regard to caution such as a man of ordinary prudence would observe. That was, in substance, the criterion presented to the jury in this case and, therefore, the present rule must be discharged. English courts upheld the standard again nearly 20 years later in Blyth v. Company Proprietors of the Birmingham Water Works. In the case, Sir Edward Hall Alderson held:
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