Who’s at fault
Who is at fault?
How responsibility is generally assessed for each kind of collision — the starting presumption, the circumstances that displace it, and the evidence that decides it. Written from state traffic codes and federal crash data.
Start with what happened
Each collision type below has separate pages for separate questions. They are separate because search results treat them as separate questions — the page about who is at fault and the page about what a claim is worth share almost no results with each other.
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Rear-end collision
- What happens next The sequence in the hours and days after, and what is worth preserving.
- Who is at fault The starting presumption, what displaces it, and what evidence decides it.
- If the car ahead stopped short The most-searched rebuttal: what a sudden stop does and does not change, and the evidence that separates the sub-cases.
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Multi-vehicle rear-end
Other guides
- Claim value in preparation What drives the value of an injury claim, by injury and collision type, and what the published data does and does not support.
- Crash reports & data in preparation How to obtain a crash report in each state, what it contains, and what the federal crash record shows about collisions where you live.
- State law in preparation Limitation periods, negligence rules, damage caps and insurance minimums, state by state, each cited to the statute.
- Pedestrians & cyclists in preparation What happens after a pedestrian or cyclist is struck by a vehicle — responsibility, records, and the federal data on how these collisions happen.