 So there are a lot of things you can do to a person or their property. They will get you sued and sued good. But there are also several defenses you can raise in court. To start with, you could claim that the person consented or agreed to the action that hurt them, no matter what it might have been. It even counts as consent if they never come right out and tell you to do it, but they act in such a way that a reasonable person would assume that they have consented. You can't claim the person consented if they were obviously not capable of giving consent. There is a special exception though in many places where you can claim consent to help an injured unconscious person. It's not clear why someone would sue the person trying to help them, but it happens. You can also get in trouble for doing more than the person consented to unless there's some emergency that justifies it. While someone can give consent even if their consent is based on a mistake, the consent won't count if the mistake was caused by or known by the person getting sued. A famous case of this was where a woman invited her doctor to her house to help her give birth and the doctor brought some random dude with him who wasn't a doctor. The woman said it was okay because the second guy was a doctor and the actual doctor didn't correct her, so her consent didn't get him out of being sued. Consent also doesn't count if it's given under threats. Another way to get out of being sued is to claim self-defense. You can harm someone and not get sued for it if you are using reasonable force to keep someone from harming you or from touching you in an offensive way. Even if you're in a situation where force can be used for self-defense, that doesn't mean you can use as much force as you want to. The amount of force you use has to be reasonable. That means you can't use deadly force unless you're being threatened with death or serious bodily harm. You can even use force in self-defense if you think you're in danger and you're wrong as long as it was reasonable to think so. You are not, however, allowed to use force after the danger has passed. Words by themselves almost never justify the use of force in self-defense no matter how hurtful they are. You also can't use force in self-defense to avoid some distant future harm. You can use force to defend someone else without getting sued provided that they have the right to use force in their own defense. Some places will let you off though if you help someone who it turns out didn't deserve it. You can use force to defend property without being sued as long as the force is reasonable. Deadly force to preserve property is pretty much never reasonable. There's also the defense of necessity. It means when you're allowed to damage someone else's property to keep something much worse from happening. Not quite. Better. Moving on. Necessity is nice because then you don't have to pay damages or go to court. If you cause damage to save the public or a large group of people, then you don't even have to pay for whatever damage you caused. If you only save yourself, then you still have to pay for the damage you caused though you won't be liable for anything extra like punitive damages. And there you have it.