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The reasonable person standard is often used legal term that originated in the development of the common law. The "reasonable person" is a legal fiction which represents a reasoned outlook on a legal question. The perspective of the reasonable man is intentionally distinct from that of an "average" person; contrary to popular misconception, the reasonable man is not necessarily average. The question of how a reasonable person might act, or what judgments they might make under the circumstances performs a critical role in legal reasoning in areas such as negligence, contract law, and criminal law. For example, the crime of sexual harassment is deemed to have occurred in some legal jurisdictions when the conduct is unwelcome and when a reasonable person would have considered such conduct sexual. The rationale for the reasonable person standard is that the law will benefit the general public when it serves its reasonable members, and thus a reasonable application of the law is sought, compatible with planning, working, or getting along with others. The reasonable person is not necessarily the "average person"; it is not a "democratic" measure. To predict the appropriate sense of responsibility and other standards of the reasonable person, "what is reasonable" has to be the primary question. (What the "average person" thinks or might do is irrelevant to a case concerning specialized technical knowledge, such as advanced mathematics.) But the reasonable person is appropriately informed, capable, aware of the law, and fair-minded. Such a person might do something extraordinary in certain circumstances, but whatever that person does or thinks is always "reasonable." One of the earliest cases contributing to the development of the modern reasonable person standard was the 1837 English case Vaughan v. Menlove. In that case, the court rejected an argument by the defendant's lawyers that the defendant should be found negligent only if he failed to act "bona fide to the best of his judgment; if he had, he ought not to be responsible for the misfortune of not possessing the highest order of intelligence." The court, reasoning that such standard would be too subjective, ruled that the better test was whether the defendant had exhibited "a regard to caution such as a man of ordinary prudence would observe." US jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes explained the reasonable person standard as resulting from the fact that for life in organized society, "a certain average of conduct, a sacrifice of individual peculiarities going beyond a certain point, is necessary to the general welfare." Echoing the court's reasoning in Vaughn v. Menlove, Holmes declared that the law "does not attempt to see men [sic] as God sees them."[1]
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