California does not ask whether a dog had a reputation before it bit someone. The statute asks two narrower questions, and most Los Angeles disputes are really arguments about the second one.
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Or call (213) 953-1047Civil Code section 3342 makes the owner of a dog liable for damages suffered by a person bitten in a public place or while lawfully in a private place, including the dog owner's own property, and it says that liability attaches regardless of the former viciousness of the animal or the owner's knowledge of it. Everything else follows from those two conditions. There must be an owner, and the bitten person must have been somewhere the law entitled that person to be. A file that spends pages on whether the dog had ever growled at a neighbor is usually a file that has lost track of what the statute measures.
The statute speaks to the owner, not to whoever happened to be holding the leash. In a city where households share courtyards, stairwells and gates, the person controlling the dog at the moment of a bite is frequently a roommate, a partner, a dog walker or a relative watching the animal for the weekend. A claim against that person does not run on section 3342 at all. It runs on the general duty in Civil Code section 1714, which makes everyone responsible for injury caused to another by want of ordinary care in managing property or person. One incident can therefore generate a statutory claim against an owner and a separate negligence claim against a handler, resting on different proof and sometimes reaching different insurance policies. Establishing ownership early, in writing, from a licensing record or an agency file rather than from a conversation, is what keeps the two theories from being confused.
Section 3342 does not leave lawful presence to argument. It states that a person is lawfully on private property of the owner when performing a duty imposed by the laws of this state, by the laws or postal regulations of the United States, or when on the property by invitation express or implied. That single sentence is why mail carriers, meter readers and process servers are treated as lawfully present without further discussion, and why an implied invitation to a front walkway matters in a duplex or a fourplex. The same sentence marks the boundary: a trespasser is outside the statute, which is where a negligence analysis and the facts about fences, gates and signs return to the center of the discussion.
Breed appears nowhere in the section. Neither does a warning sign, a prior complaint, or the length of time an owner had kept the animal. The statute does carve out working animals: subdivisions (b) through (d) exclude bites by dogs assisting peace officers or military personnel in specified duties, and they condition that exclusion on the agency having adopted a written policy on the necessary and appropriate use of the dog. The carve-out is narrow and agency-specific, and its written-policy requirement is itself a records question rather than an assumption.
Civil Code section 3342.5 sits directly beside the liability rule and does something different. Subdivision (a) places on the owner of a dog that has bitten a human being the duty to take reasonable steps to remove any danger presented to others from bites by that animal. Subdivision (b) provides that when a dog has bitten a human being on at least two separate occasions, any person, the district attorney or a city attorney may bring an action against the owner, in the county where a bite occurred, to determine whether conditions of treatment or confinement have changed enough to remove the danger, and the court after hearing may make any order it considers appropriate, including removal of the animal from the area or its destruction. Subdivision (d) withholds that action for bites on a trespasser and for military or police dogs actually performing in that capacity.
A restraint violation is a separate lever. Evidence Code section 669 creates a presumption of failure to exercise due care when a person violates a statute or ordinance, the violation proximately caused the injury, the injury resulted from the kind of occurrence the enactment was designed to prevent, and the injured person was within the class the enactment protected. Inside the City, Municipal Code section 53.06.2 supplies the enactment by requiring a dog off its keeper's premises to be controlled by a competent person on a substantial chain or leash no longer than six feet.
Where more than one person is at fault, the split is not uniform. Under Civil Code section 1431.2, liability for non-economic damages is several only and each defendant answers in direct proportion to that defendant's percentage of fault, while the same section defines economic damages as objectively verifiable monetary losses such as medical expenses and lost earnings. The measure itself comes from Civil Code section 3333, which allows compensation for all the detriment proximately caused, whether or not it could have been anticipated.
A dated account of the location, the identity of the owner as distinct from the handler, the agency report numbers, the treatment records and photographs taken across the healing period. This page is general information about California and Los Angeles rules, not legal advice about any particular incident. Questions about a specific bite belong with the attorney who advertises on this site.
Strict Liability Dog Bite Lawyer in Los Angeles. Call (213) 953-1047 and a Los Angeles lawyer reviews the claim and the deadline that applies. Nothing is signed on that call.
Call (213) 953-1047The County rabies manual states that County Code section 11.04.210 sets a quarantine of at least fourteen days, reduced to ten days for dogs and cats, with release possible after five days if a veterinarian examines the animal on the fifth day or later and certifies no clinical signs of rabies. Section 11.04.220 allows the confinement at home or in a licensed boarding kennel, and section 11.04.225 sets a fifty-dollar confinement fee that is recovered when the bitten person was neither the owner nor the custodian of the animal and was not engaged in illegal activity.
Why it matters: The quarantine file is a dated public record of where the animal was kept in the days after a bite, and the confinement fee line can indicate how the agency recorded the bitten person's relationship to the animal.
Source: publichealth.lacounty.gov
The Los Angeles Housing Department states that the Rent Stabilization Ordinance covers approximately 624,000 units in 118,000 properties, generally rental units in buildings with two or more units built on or before October 1, 1978.
Why it matters: A very large share of City addresses are older multi-unit buildings with shared hallways, courtyards, stairwells and gates, which is why so many local bite accounts involve a building owner or manager as well as a dog owner.
Source: housing.lacity.gov
Los Angeles Municipal Code section 53.06.2 requires a dog off its keeper’s premises to be under a competent person’s control on a substantial chain or leash no longer than six feet, except for the stated dog exercise or training-area exception.
Why it matters: For a bite on a City sidewalk, street, or common area, the exact location and restraint details may be evidence worth preserving; this City rule is not automatically the rule for every County address.
Source: codelibrary.amlegal.com
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