Before a jury ever asks whether someone was careless, the law asks a colder question first. Did they owe you care at all.
Duty is the first element of negligence, and it is the one the defense attacks first, because if there was no duty, there is no case, whatever the harm. It is not about what happened. It is about the relationship that existed before anything happened.
Most duties come from a simple place: the obligation to act as a reasonable person toward those your conduct can foreseeably hurt. A driver owes it to everyone sharing the road. Some duties come from a specific relationship, a trucking company to the motoring public, a jailer to an inmate, a property owner to a guest. And some are set by a statute or a safety rule that fixes the standard in advance.
The stopped vehicle is the clean example. Leave a disabled car in a live travel lane, or a truck blocking a road with no warning, and the question is whether a reasonable person would foresee the danger to others coming upon it. If yes, the duty exists, and the case can begin.
The move: prove duty first and concretely, with the rule, the relationship, and the foreseeability spelled out. A powerful showing of careless conduct means nothing if the defense wins the argument that no care was owed. And here is the wire to watch: duty is usually a question of law for the judge, not the jury, decided in briefs before trial ever starts. Win it there, on paper, or you never reach the jury at all.
One word. Careless only matters if you were owed care.
