50. If the plaintiff sues the shop's owner for the injury she suffered, will the plaintiff prevail?

The issue in this question is negligence and foreseeability. To prove negligence, a plaintiff must establish duty, breach, causation, and damages. To establish causation, the plaintiff must address both types: actual causation and proximate causation. Actual causation, also called factual causation, traditionally asks whether the defendant's action was the «but-for» cause of the harm. In other words, «but-for» the defendant's actions or omissions, would the plaintiff still have suffered the harm?

Proximate causation focuses on foreseeability and is a legal limit on actual causation to address unforeseeable harms. It is unclear whether actual causation is met on these facts: even if the shop owner had armed the motion detector, the inmate might still have stolen the ammunition and committed the crime. Proximate causation, however, is simply not met on these facts. A defendant is not liable for unforeseeable events that occur after the defendant's actions and cause the harm. The classic examples of such superseding events are acts of God (lightning strikes, etc.) and intentional crimes.

D is correct. The inmate's intentional criminal act cuts off the shop owner's liability under the proximate causation analysis. Even classic examples do not always cut-off the defendant's liability. If the facts demonstrate that, for example, it was a high crime area, then an intentional crime is still potentially foreseeable. Here, the mere presence of a prison somewhere «nearby» does not make an inmate escape and crime foreseeable — such things normally do not happen. Proximate causation is therefore not met, and the shop owner is not liable.

A is incorrect. It is possible that the plaintiff's injury (being shot by the inmate) could have been prevented if the motion detector had been activated, but that is largely speculative. But, even assuming that arming the motion detector would prevent the theft and subsequent shooting, there is no negligence (or other) cause of action available against the shop owner for merely forgetting to arm an alarm.

B is incorrect. As discussed above, the unforeseeable intervening intentional crime by the escaped inmate supersedes and cuts-off the shop owner's liability.

C is incorrect. This answer choice addresses strict liability. It is true that defendants are potentially strictly liable if they are engaged in an «abnormally dangerous activity.» When strict liability applies, even other efforts by the defendant to prevent the harm (such as the shop owner's locking the ammunition in a cabinet) will not cut off liability — even if the shop owner had also armed the motion detector, he would be liable. However, the sale of firearms and ammunition is not an abnormally dangerous activity that triggers strict liability.

Further, even if the sale of firearms and ammunition was abnormally dangerous, unforeseeable superseding acts (such as intentional crimes) can cut off the defendant's liability in strict liability as well. Thus, though this question correctly notes that strict liability is not an available cause of action here, it does not fully identify the reason it is inapplicable, and it also does not address the claim the facts are focused upon: negligence (the facts even use the word «negligently» in describing the shop owner's actions).