Every person is responsible for injury to the person, property, or rights of another caused by his willful acts or caused by his want of ordinary care or skill, subject in the latter cases to the defense of contributory negligence.
S.D. Codified Laws § 20-9-1
Responsibility for injury by willful act or negligence--Contributory negligence
Applied in 58 court decisions — leading case Bego v. Gordon (1987)
Most recently applied in McGee v. Spencer Quarries, Inc. (December 2023)
Source: CivC 1877, § 979; CL 1887, § 3603; RCivC 1903, § 1297; RC 1919, § 801; SDC 1939, § 47.0304.
How often courts cite this section
Court decisions citing this, by year. The dip in the last several years is a data-coverage gap, not a real trend — our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so recent citations are undercounted.
Official source: South Dakota Legislature. Reproduced from public-domain South Dakota statutes; confirm against the official source for the current text. Not legal advice.