 Let's talk about torts for a moment. Delicious delicious torts Wait, no, not the pastry kind the legal kind a Tort is something you sue someone for doing to you. It's not very delicious at all One kind of tort is the intentional kind. This is something you intend to do to another person that causes damage Now you don't necessarily need to intend to cause the specific harm that they sue you for You just need to intend to affect the other person and harm needs to result from your actions So if you intend to give them a good scare and they have a heart attack and die You don't get off the hook because you didn't intend to kill them If you do something and a harmful result is possible, but not substantially certain You can get in trouble for acting recklessly, but you wouldn't get in trouble for acting intentionally You can even intend to commit one tort against someone and get sued for a different one that you accidentally commit in the process So what are a few common intentional torts first? There's battery No, battery is the intentional infliction of harmful or offensive contact You can't sue over ordinary and reasonable contact though, even if you personally find it offensive Assault is No assault is something that gets mixed up with battery a lot where battery is harmful or offensive contact Assault is giving someone the reasonable belief that you were about to make harmful or offensive contact with them You'll note that I said reasonable if most people wouldn't think they were about to be touched then you can't sue for assault You'll also note that I said the belief has to be that they are about to be touched You can't be assaulted if the contact could come at some later point Most states have a rule that words alone aren't enough to justify believing you're about to be touched Assault is different than attempted battery Attempted battery is attempting to cause contact and failing where assault is intending to make someone think you were trying to harm them Even if you never meant to False imprisonment is where you can find someone against their will the confinement has to have definite physical boundaries and the trap person can Only sue for false imprisonment if there are no reasonable means of escape. I said reasonable means of escape You can even be falsely imprisoned if the only thing holding you there are threats of harm in the near future Finally we turn to intentional infliction of emotional distress the name kind of says it all it's where you Intentionally inflict emotional distress not just anything counts the conduct needs to be so extreme and outrageous that it goes outside all bounds of decency It's a tough test to meet one of the more famous cases is where someone told a woman as a practical joke That her husband had been horribly injured and was near death So she had a nervous collapse the victim can't recover if they just happen to be very sensitive And they also have to show that they actually suffered distress not just that what happened to them was really horrible So being very thick skin would hurt your ability to recover You can be sued for things you intentionally do to property as well as for things you intentionally do to people One toward about property is trespass. There's trespass to land and trespass to chattels Chattels is just yield English for movable property trespass to land is when you enter someone else's land without permission Or when you enter with permission, but you don't leave when the permission ends You can't be sued if you didn't enter the other person's land on purpose But you can be sued if you enter the land on purpose, but mistakenly think you're not trespassing You don't even need to enter the land personally to cause a trespass if you cause another object to enter the land Then you've still trespassed It used to be that your land rights extended upwards to the heavens and down into the earth now You get rights for a short distance near the direction but nothing further which makes sense from the perspective of the airlines trespass to chattels is when you interfere with someone else's use of their personal property It's not just stealing the thing because that's its own tort called conversion for trespass to chattels You have to show that there was some damage to the owner either from their property losing value or from the owner being unable to Use it for some significant period Conversion is taking something permanently It means to convert the property from the owners to your own which requires paying the full value as damages It does not mean changing the property's religion The property either needs to be taken entirely and not returned Or the value needs to have been reduced enough that it is considered the equivalent of just taking it And there you have it