In what may be the clearest example of assumption of risk in torts, a 37-year-old Menasha, Wisconsin woman rode around flashing barriers on a bridge to try to make it across before it was open for river traffic. She did not make it.
She reportedly suffered only facial injuries which shows far more luck than sense.
Justice Frankfurter once described the term “assumption of risk” as a term “undiscriminatingly used to express different and sometimes contradictory ideas.” He complained that its uncritical use “bedevils the law.” Tiller v. Atlantic Coast Line R. Co. 318 U.S. 54 (1943). This would not be one of those cases.
In torts, assumption of the risk can be either implied or express so long as you (1) knew of the risk of injury and (2) voluntary took on that danger in your actions. Evading flashing barriers and riding on to a bridge in the process of being raised would easily meet any interpretation of that common law defense.
