Jim,

Your post said: “For anyone that is interested this is the definition of the Standard of Care from the Black's Law Dictionary.” Then you proceeded to misquote even the Online Ethics Center misquote. You wrote: “The standard of care is the degree of care that a reasonably prudent person would exercise in the circumstance in question. In negligence law if a person's conduct falls below such standards, he may be liable in damages for injuries or damages resulting from his conduct. In professional malpractice cases, a standard of care is applied to measure the competence as well of the degree of care shown by the professional's actions. A traditional standard for a practitioner is to ‘exercise the average degree of skill, care, and diligence exercised by members of the same profession (or specialty within that profession), practicing in the same or a similar locality in light of the present state of the profession.”

The only quote from Black’s Law Dictionary in the “standard of care” section on the Online Ethics Center is: “average degree of skill, care and diligence exercised by members of the same profession, (or specialty within that profession) practicing in the same or similar locality in light of the present state of the profession,” which is an only partially correct and partially mis-paraphased quote from a court decision, Gillette v. Tucker, 67 Ohio St. 106, 65 N.E. 865.

The actual quote cited in Black’s Law Dictionary 5th Edition deals with doctors and medical malpractice, “average degree of skill, care and diligence exercised by members of the same profession, practicing in the same or similar locality in light of the present state of medical and surgical science,” and clearly is identified in Black’s as “The traditional standard for doctors…”

The way you quoted it and the way the Online Ethics Center quoted it are clearly misleading whether it was intentional or not.

Pat Kennedy, CFEI, CFPS, MIFireE
Fire and Explosion Analyst
Sarasota, Florida
[www.kennedy-fire.com]