Yesterday I taught my first Torts class of the year and, as always, we began with Garratt v. Dailey, 279 P.2d 1091 (Wash. 1955), where an elderly woman sued a five-year-old boy for battery for pulling a chair out from under her as she was (allegedly) trying to sit in it.
The main issue was whether the Brian Dailey, the five-year-old, had what is called “belief intent” (aka “substantial certainty” intent) that the plaintiff would try to sit where the chair had been previously situated in the backyard.
But an interesting side issue was whether a five-year-old is capable of forming the requisite “intent” to commit an intentional tort. Perhaps surprisingly to non-lawyers, the Garratt court, as have other courts, held that even young children have the mental capacity to form the intent to inflict a harmful or offensive bodily contact upon another.
Students often question this principle, arguing that five-year-olds lack the mental capacity to appreciate the consequences of their acts. Importantly, the law of intent does not require that the child intended to “injure” the other or to appreciate all the ramifications of his or her acts (such as, in Garratt, that the elderly plaintiff would suffer a fractured hip when she fell to the ground).
But now a video clip of a young girl walloping her infant brother into a foam pit strongly suggests the courts got it right on this point:
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