What Defends You

Foodborne-illness and foreign-object claims, premises liability, negligence per se, lease pest clauses, insurance described plainly, and the records courts have weighed. Not legal advice.

• An Insect or a Foreign Object in the Food: How Courts Have Decided These Claims

  Two tests decide most of these cases, and both ask what a reasonable diner would expect. Utah's only foreign-object decisions are bottled-beverage cases from 1950 and 1960; no Utah restaurant case was found.

• Foodborne Illness Claims, and Whether a Health-Code Violation Is Negligence by Itself

  Causation is the hard part of a food-poisoning case, and courts have gone both ways on the same kind of proof. In Utah a code violation is prima facie evidence of negligence, not negligence per se, and no Utah case has applied that rule to a restaurant's food-code line.

• A Customer Bitten or Stung: Premises Liability for Pests

  A restaurant owes its customers reasonable care about pests on the premises; that is the holding of the one appellate pest-bite case found. In Utah the invitee standard turns on notice and time to fix, or on whether the owner created the condition. No Utah pest case found.

• Your Lease and Your Insurance: Where Pest Duties and Pest Claims Land

  The lease decides who fixes the back door. Utah law makes rent depend on the landlord's important covenants, but no case allocates pest duties in a restaurant lease. On insurance, two state supreme courts read the same exclusion opposite ways; the wording and the state decide.

• Pest Records That Hold Up: What Courts Have Actually Looked At

  No restaurant case has turned on pest-control service records; sighting logs and inspection evidence have cut both ways. Six records, each tied to a rule, kept in one binder, with the 'what was done' column filled in.