Negligence

On the MBE the fight is almost always over a single element, not all four — the call-of-the-question and answer choices tell you which. When a statute is in play, look for negligence per se: an unexcused violation of a safety statute conclusively establishes duty and breach if the plaintiff is in the protected class and the harm is the type the statute meant to prevent — but the plaintiff still must prove causation and damages, so a choice saying the violation alone wins is wrong. Where direct proof of breach is missing, res ipsa loquitur lets breach be inferred when the harm ordinarily results from negligence; the traditional test also demands the instrumentality be in the defendant’s exclusive control (the Restatement (Third) relaxes this to a “class of actors” likely responsible — most MBE answers still use exclusive control).

The classic trap is mixing up the elements: breach is the standard-of-care question, distinct from duty (the Palsgraf foreseeable-plaintiff fight) and from proximate cause — i.e., scope of liability. Foreseeability lives in both duty and proximate cause; don’t let one swallow the other. And damages are required — negligence, unlike many intentional torts, has no nominal-damages shortcut.