Occasionally, a Buffalo personal injury lawsuit may involve a claim of “negligent entrustment” on the part of one of the defendants. Negligent entrustment is the act of leaving an object, such as a car or a weapon, with someone whom the lender knows or should know could use the object to harm others due to such factors as youth, inexperience, or personal history.
A current area of interest regarding the application of negligent entrustment as a basis for pursuing a personal injury lawsuit involves rented or leased vehicles. Generally, car rental agencies are protected from liability when driver’s of their vehicles cause accidents under the federal Graves Amendment. If, however, the rental company gave or rented a car to a person that they knew, or should have known, was not competent to drive or was likely to cause injury to others, the rental company may be liable if that driver causes an accident.
Since these cases hinge on what the rental company knew or could be reasonably expected to know about the status of the driver, the courts are still determining the parameters under which such cases may be pursued. As an example, however, the Federal Court for the Eastern District of New York recently has ruled that the Graves Amendment did not protect a car rental company against an allegation of negligently entrusting an automobile to someone without a valid driver’s license who later injured another party in an accident.
The renter involved had presented a document that was purportly an Israeli driver’s license, which was written in Hebrew with no picture on it. The rental company apparently took no steps to confirm that this was actually a license, which it was not. When the driver injured an individual in an automobile accident, the injured party sued the rental agency. The ruling of the Federal Court for the Eastern District of New York may allow the case to proceed under a theory of negligent entrustment.
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