Care

As a legal term, this word means diligence, prudence, discretion, attentiveness, watchfulness, vigilance. It is the opposite of negligence or carelessness. There are three degrees of care in the law, corresponding (inversely) to the three degrees of negligence, viz.: slight care, ordinary care, and great care. Slight care or diligence is such as persons of ordinary prudence usually exercise about their own affairs of slight importance; ordinary care or diligence is such as they usually exercise about their own affairs of ordinary importance; and great care or diligence is such as they usually exercise about their own affairs of great importance.

Civil Code Dak. § 2100.

The exact boundaries between the several degrees of care, and their correlative degrees of carelessness, or negligence, are not always clearly defined or easily pointed out. We think, however, that by "ordinary care" is meant that degree of care which may reasonably be expected from a person in the party's situation, — that is, "reasonable care;" and that "gross negligence" imports not a malicious intention or design to produce a particular injury, but a thoughtless disregard of consequences, the absence, rather than the actual exercise, of volition with reference to results.

23 Conn. 443.

Slight care is such as is usually exercised by persons of common sense, but careless habits, under circumstances similar to those of the particular case in which the question arises, and where their own interests are to be protected from a similar injury. Ordinary care is such as is usually exercised in the like circumstances by the majority of the community, or by persons of careful and prudent habits. Great care is such as is exercised under such circumstances by persons of unusually careful and prudent habits.

Abbott.