## Facts

- A Baltimore County middle-school art teacher taught an eighth-grade class that included a 13-year-old student.
- During class, as the teacher began to sit, the student intentionally pulled the chair away “as a joke.”
- The student admitted she knew the teacher would fall to the floor and that causing the fall was her intent, though she denied intending injury.
- The teacher fell, injured her back, received medical treatment, and later underwent spinal fusion surgery.
- The teacher sued nearly three years after the incident, pleading negligence; her husband asserted a derivative claim based on the same alleged negligence.

## Issues

1. Whether battery requires intent to cause physical harm, or whether intent to cause harmful or offensive contact (including with substantial certainty of contact) is sufficient.
2. Whether conduct that satisfies the elements of battery may nevertheless be treated as negligence for purposes of liability and limitations.
3. Whether the one-year statute of limitations for battery barred recovery when suit was filed within three years but beyond one year.

## Decision

- The appellate court affirmed the defense verdict.
- The trial court correctly instructed that battery is an intentional harmful or offensive touching; intent to injure is not required.
- Given the student’s admitted intent that the teacher fall, the jury could classify the conduct as battery rather than negligence.
- Once the conduct was classified as battery, the one-year limitations period applied and barred recovery.

## Legal Principles

- Battery is the intentional infliction of a harmful or offensive contact; the actor need not intend the resulting physical injury.
- Intent for battery includes acting with the purpose to cause contact or with knowledge that contact is substantially certain to occur.
- A plaintiff may not avoid intentional-tort consequences, including a shorter statute of limitations, by labeling intentional conduct as negligence.
- When limitations depend on the nature of the underlying conduct, courts look to the substance of the act rather than the pleaded label.

## Conclusion

The court held that intentionally pulling away a chair with knowledge the victim would fall supports battery because intent to cause the contact (or its substantial certainty), not intent to injure, is required; the plaintiff could not recharacterize that intentional act as negligence to bypass the one-year limitations period, so judgment for the defendant was affirmed.


Ghassemieh v. Schafer, 52 Md. App. 31, 447 A.2d 84 (Md. Ct. Spec. App. 1982)