Premium Essay

Tort Law

In:

Submitted By MysaK
Words 986
Pages 4
MATERIALS WEEK 1

The dotted line between ‘fault liability’ and ‘strict liability’: four ideal types of liability in tort law

1. Are the notions of fault and strict liability misleading?

• two notions should be considered as they will be applied all along the four types of liability:

- fault (as in fault liability) ( liability for one’s own faults.

- risk (or strict liability) ( accountability, based on criteria other than individual fault, for the consequences resulting from an unlawful/illegal act.

Four ideal types

• a) Individual liability for one’s own faults

▪ the basis for this type of liability lies in the conduct of the person held liable. ( this deserves the qualification ‘fault liability’.

▪ article 6:162 BW is the legal basis for the duty to pay damages where the conduct of a person is qualified as wrongful.

• b) Individual liability without blameworthiness

▪ accountability is required. ( elements of fault, as wrongful conduct provides the foundation but also elements of strict liability, since there may be no grounds for apportioning blame.

▪ article 6:162 BW as well as article 6:165 BW may provide some legal basis.

• c) Liability for damage caused by others (vicarious liability)

▪ this is a form of strict liability, insofar as there is strict responsibility for the fault of others.

▪ Articles 6:169, 6:170, 6:171 and 6:172 BW provide some legal bases for this form of liability.

• d) Liability for damage caused by things

▪ the possessor will be held liable merely by virtue of his or her possession. ex: road traffic accidents - the owner or keeper incurs the risk for the faults of whomsoever he allows to drive the vehicle. in addition, the owner or keeper also bears the risk of any technical

Similar Documents

Premium Essay

Tort Law

...QUESTION. “The law tampers with the But for test of causation as its peril.” -Lord Brown; Sienkiewicz v Greif (UK) Ltd (2011) The Bust for test of causation is said to be fraught with difficulties. How has the law developed to overcome these difficulties? INTRODUCTION Negligence in the law of tort is the failure to exercise the care that a reasonably straight person would exercise in such like circumstances. In tort law, this area of negligence involves harm caused by carelessness and not by intention. The tort of negligence structures a standout amongst the most element and quickly changing zones of obligation in the present day law. Its rise in the 20th century shows the pressure of the social and economic changes on the traditional ways of legal redress for interference with protected interests. The reasonable structure of carelessness is very adaptable and fit for general application. These components have permitted the courts to use the tort in the setting of novel cases for pay. On the other hand, the development of carelessness has not supported the extension of risk and throughout the years, courts have been putting a few limitations on this degree. The tort of carelessness does not right now appear to be set upon some foreordained way of growth as it once had all the earmarks of being. The modern history of tort law started with the groundbreaking judgment of Lord Atkin in Donoghue v Stevenson where Mrs Donoghue went to a cafe with a friend. The friend...

Words: 4638 - Pages: 19

Premium Essay

Law of Tort

...Introduction This assignment will establish the elements needed for a person to be held liable in Tortious Law. Once the elements have been established they shall then be used to determine if the individuals in each scenario would be held liable. Tort Law Tort Law in layman’s terms is a civil wrong. It does not necessarily need to be an illegal action but an action that has consequently caused harm or suffering to another. The main outcome for a person claiming they have been a victim of a tortious act is compensation. For a successful tort claim the three main elements need to be present and their needs to be a standard of proof; a balance of probabilities. The Necessary Elements As followed in Donoghue v Stevenson [1932] AC 562 i. Duty of Care ii. Breach of Duty iii. Damage caused by Breach of Duty. Causation This coincides with the three part test established in case that leads precedent in tortious liability, Caparo Industries Plc v Dickman [1990] 1 All ER 568. i. Foreseeability of Damage ii. A relationship characterised by the law as one of proximity or neighbourhood. iii. A relationship characterised by the law as one of proximity or neighbourhood Duty of Care Duty of care prior to 1932 was restricted to situations where a relationship had already been established such as a doctor-patient relationship. However in Donoghue v Stevenson that duty of care became adapted. Lord Atkin formulated a principle known as the ‘neighbour test’; ‘take reasonable care...

Words: 1639 - Pages: 7

Premium Essay

Tort Law

...Torts Assignment PART 1 1) Does Autumn Bay High owe a duty of care to Persephone and Aphrodite? Consider the common law as well as any impact that the Civil Liability Act 2002 (NSW) may have on the common law. The main considerations that have to be taken into account when deciding whether Autumn Bay High owed a duty of care to Persephone and Aphrodite are the reasonable foreseeability of nervous shock and whether their duty of care was non-delegable. Under the Civil Liability Act 2002 (NSW) “the defendant owes a duty of care to the plaintiff if they ought to have foreseen that a person of normal fortitude might, in the circumstances of the case, suffer a recognized psychiatric illness if reasonable care were not taken”. It has been established through Tame v New South Wales & Annetts v Australian Stations Pty Limited[1] that reasonable foreseeability of mental harm is a precondition of the existence of a duty of care. Taking the provisions of the Civil Liability Act 2002 (NSW) into account, the fact that the school is taking its students on a ski trip already establishes a general duty of care. It is reasonably foreseeable that such an activity poses the possibility of serious injuries if adequate supervision is not provided. In addition to this, it is not fanciful or far-fetched that witnessing a horrific physical injury to a fellow student can cause sudden shock and consequential mental harm to a person. While Aphrodite witnesses the actual accident, and sees...

Words: 3481 - Pages: 14

Premium Essay

Tort Law

...teacher Md. Ashiqur Rahman Bhuiyan for his exemplary guidance, monitoring and constant encouragement throughout the whole semester. Lastly I would like thank my respective parents, siblings, friends and colleagues to support and helped me to successfully complete full assignment . Table of Contents Contents TORT: 3 Intentional Tort: 3 Strict Liability: 3 Negligence: 4 Duty of care: 4 Breach of Duty: 5 Causation: 6 Vicarious Liability: 8 Reference: 12 LO 3 Understanding the principles of liability in negligence in business activities. TORT: The liability of the violation of a fixed law, law arises primarily; this duty is towards persons generally and its breach is capable of redress by action unliquidated damages. This is a civil wrong, in the sense that it is committed against an individual, not the State. The essence of tort law is that a person has certain interests that are protected by law. These interests can be protected by a court granting a sum of money, known as damages. There are increasingly limited circumstances where the victim of a tort may avail himself of self-help. Types of Tort: There are basically three types of tort:...

Words: 2880 - Pages: 12

Free Essay

Law of Tort

...Law of tort is a civil wrong other than a claim for breach of contract; and for which a right civil action for damages may arise. Negligence is defined by Winfield and Jolowicz as “Tortious liability arises from the breach of duty primarily fixed by the law; this duty is towards persons generally and its breach is redressible by an action for unliquidated damages”. (Roger, W.V.H., 2006) In Malaysia, the law of tort is largely derived from common law in England. In the law of tort, negligence is the most widely used tort in the legal system. In order for a claimant who is seeking for remedy to successfully bring a claim in a negligence case, they must first prove these 3 factors: * The defendant held a legal duty against the claimant. Therefore, the defendant owed the claimant a duty of care. * The defendant had breach of that duty. * The claimant are suffering damages resulted in that breach of duty. These three factors will sometimes be shortened as duty, breach and damage. Duty of care This important factor of negligence came from a famous case of Donoghue v Stevenson (1932). In this case, the claimant, Ms Donoghue went to the Minchella’s Wellmeadow Café in Paisley with her friend. Her friend ordered a bottle of ginger beer that was contained in an opaque bottle. When she poured the remained ginger beer, a decomposed snail came out with her ice cream. Ms Donoghue became ill as she has consumed the contaminated beer. She could not sue the café under the rule of...

Words: 7008 - Pages: 29

Premium Essay

Tort Law

...doctor must not in violate of duty of his service that is as a medical professional is not guilty of negligence. If he has acted in accordance with his service and with a proper responsible medical person experience is a special art. In this aspect the doctor is not a negligent. 2. Tort law Tort law covers in various areas like a claims of passenger insured in a road accident, a patient issue by doctor negligence. People arrested by police wrongly, and landowner land has been trespassed on. The tort law comes when there is a violation of general responsible duty fixed by civil law . Normally tort law is committed and allows the victim to claim towards financial due to damage of this personal so that it is a compensate for the commission of the tort. Basically the Tort Law involves violation of the duty that is fixed by the law. According to the above Bolam medical case as I mentioned above will comes under this law because the doctor negligence due to violating of his duty and responsibility to identify the patient treatment requirements. For example the duty of the doctor responsible as per the contract is a violate on his responsibilities is a issue in this situation. The tort main...

Words: 2334 - Pages: 10

Premium Essay

Tort Law

...Title : “To impose a duty of care in negligence on the police for their failure to prevent a crime taking place, even in situations where both the suspect and victim were (or ought to be) known, is a tremendously difficult task.” Why is it so notoriously difficult to bring successful negligence claims in such situations? The tort of negligence is defined as the breach of a legal duty to take care resulting in damage to claimant which was not desired by the defendant. According to Blyth v Birmingham Waterworks Co it is the “omission to do something which a reasonable man, guided upon those considerations which ordinarily regulate the conduct of human affairs, would do, or doing something which a prudent and reasonable man would not do”. But the point is that the Law of negligence has no statutory basis. It has developed through a huge number of cases. This means that whenever considering a duty of care exists in any given situation the courts have flexibility to take public policy consideration into account and steer the evolution of the tort of negligence accordingly. This flexibility has also allowed to protect certain classes of defendant from liability in negligence. The traditional approach adopted by the courts has been to refuse an action against the police either on policy grounds or because there is no proximity between the injured person and the police agent. Since the implementation of the Human Right Act 1998 it is possible to bring a direct action under...

Words: 1591 - Pages: 7

Premium Essay

Law of Torts

...STAGE ONE: IDENTIFICATION OF THE ISSUES APPARENT I have been asked to advise my client as to his/her prospect regarding. The relevant material facts contained in the excerpt provided include……… From initial viewing of the hypothetical facts I propose that there are numerous legal issues contained: STAGE 2: IDENTIFICATION AND EXPLANATION OF THE APPLICABLE LEGAL RULES I assert that the relevant rules that apply are found in the law of torts(with specific identification to the tort of negligence, a tort that emerged as of primary importance as per the landmark decision in the House of Lords in Donoghue v Stevenson (1932) AC 562.) and statutory provisions of the Civil Liability Act 2002 (WA) which have been enacted to either clarify or modify the common law rules that determine liability for negligence. As a broadly conceived scope, the underlying principle of negligence is that a defendant may be liable in a wide range of circumstances for failure to take reasonable care which causes harm to a plaintiff’ protected interests. Now, wrongful or careless behaviour is not always actionable in negligence. The defendant will only be liable if the plaintiff can prove that three essential requirements are satisfied: Three essential requirements that must be satisfied in order to establish liability in negligence: (a) That the defendant owed the plaintiff a duty of care * Pre – existing relationship will create a duty of care. OR * “Neighbour principle”...

Words: 1916 - Pages: 8

Premium Essay

Tort Law in Construction

...(119324) Yeow Jun Heng (119383) Submitted to : Date : 1st December 2014 Content Introduction- Tort Law…………………………………………..................................3 Trespass……………………………………………………………………………..4-6 Nuisance…………………………………………………………………………....7-12 Negligence………………………………………………………………………..13-14 Distinguishing nuisance and trespassing to land……………………………………15 Distinguishing nuisance and negligence…………………………………………16-17 Discussion……………………………………………………………………………18 Reference…………………………………………………………………………......19 INTRODUCTION Tort Law Tort law is a body of rights, obligations and remedies that is applied by courts in civil proceedings to provide relief for persons who have suffered harm from the wrongful acts of others. The person who sustains injury or suffers pecuniary damage as the result of tortious conduct is known as the plaintiff, and the person who is responsible for inflicting the injury and incurs liability for the damage is known as the defendant or tortfeasor. Tort denotes a breach of duty imposed by law. The nature of the duty is to act as a reasonable person exercising reasonable diligence. Tort exceeds the obligation of a party under contract. The duty could be to the other party in a contractual relationship, as well as to any third party who, it is reasonably foreseeable, would get affected by the actions of a persons. There are three constituents of tort: 1. There must be a wrongful act committed by a person. 2. The wrongful act must give rise to...

Words: 4233 - Pages: 17

Premium Essay

The Tort Law

...Negligent Tort Linda Rapp Bus 670 Dr. Jennifer Stevens Febuary10, 2014 Ashford University Negligent Tort Understanding the Negligent Tort concerning product subject to recall from the Consumer Product Safety Division the product involved was three styles of Sugarfly-branded hooded woven and cotton styles jackets. The jackets were manufactured by Burlington Coat Factory stores nationwide. Style number KMCB1255,KMCBJ410,KMCBJ421 are the products being recalled the hooded jacket should be taken away from children to avoid hazard. The coat coat sizes are for girls age 7 through 16 the date of the recall is from September 2011 through September 2013. The consumer will receive complete product refund around $ 40.00. The Burlington Coat Factory negligent actions in selling the product in question in product liability with the laws that protect consumers the Safety Improvement Act in 2008 (Seaquist,2012) The answer is if the Burlington Coat Factory had not recalled the product and caused harm to consumers they would have been liable for negligence actions. The Discusses the following in relation to the product recall:: Duty of Care Standard of Care Breach of the Duty of Care Actual Causation Proximate Causation Actual Injury Defenses to Negligence Analyze and apply a relevant consumer protection statute identified under “Consumer Protection” in Chapter 8 of your text in conjunction with the product recall that you have identified.Must addres Home / Regulations...

Words: 336 - Pages: 2

Premium Essay

Law of Tort

...Negligence In order to advise XXX any claims he may have in torts, it is necessary to determine if such negligence exists. To sue for negligence, the burden of proof is on the plaintiff who has suffered damage to establish the following four prerequisites based on the evidence: 1) A duty of care owed by the defendant to the plaintiff; 2) Breach of the duty of care by the defendant; 3) Plaintiff suffered damage resulting from the breach; and 4) The damage suffered was a foreseeable consequence of the breach that the connection between the damage and the breach were not too remote. 1) The first question of fact is “Did the defendant owe the plaintiff a duty of care?” Under the Common Law: Donoghue v Stevenson Under the common law, whether or not the defendant owed to the plaintiff a duty of care is based on the neighbour principle established in the precedent case of Donoghue v Stevenson [1932], which affirms that a sufficiently close relationship (neighbour relationship) between the parties can give rise to a duty of care. According to Donoghue v Stevenson [1932], neighbour refers to the persons who are so closely and directly affected by one’s act that one ought reasonably to have them in contemplation as being so affected when directing mind to the acts or omissions. In other words, a duty of care arises when persons in a reasonable contemplation are ought to take reasonable care to avoid acts or omissions...

Words: 1229 - Pages: 5

Free Essay

Law of Tort...Defamation

...give an individual, business, product, group, government, or nation a negative image. Defamation is the publication of a statement which refers on a person’s reputation and tends to lower him in the estimation of right-thinking members of society generally or tends to make then shun or avoid him. [1]  The tort of defamation protects a person’s interest in his reputation. If the defendant had made an untrue statement, or what amounts to a statement, which is defamatory of the plaintiff, the plaintiff has a right of action against him unless the defendant can establish one of the special defenses available to an action for defamation. Since the tort of defamation protects the plaintiff’s reputation, and since reputation depends on what other people think of the plaintiff, the publication of the statement by the defendant to persons other than the plaintiff himself is an essential part of the tort –the purpose of the tort is not to protect the injured the feelings of the plaintiff. The tort goes beyond protecting their mere personal reputation of the plaintiff and extends to the protection of the reputation of his commercial and business undertakings. The rules of the tort represent an attempt to strike a balance between two important and often competing interests, the public interest in freedom of speech and the private interest in marinating one’s reputation. The difficulty of achieving this balance is perhaps indicated by the fact that, though liability for a defamatory statement...

Words: 2909 - Pages: 12

Premium Essay

Tort Law Homework

...NEGLIGENCE Tort Law is a field that encompasses material of considerable breadth and diversity and whose existence, as a reflected in individual actions seeking civil redress for injuries nor arising out of contractual relations can be traced can be traced back to primitive societies. (White, 2003 p.23) A ‘tort’ is a Norman word for a ‘wrong’ but ‘torts’ have typically been distinguished from crimes and from ‘wrongs’ identified with contractual relations. Tort Law is concerned with civil wrongs not arising from contracts. We can see the shifting character of Tort Law in nineteenth and twentieth century America as deriving from the shifting ideas of legal scholars and judges particularly ideas about the civil responsibilities of a person to his or her neighbors in society and about the manner in which society should respond to injuries and injured people. An independent identity for Torts late in the nineteenth century is the affection of tort doctrines, especially negligence, to the problems produced by industrialization. Industrialization has played a part in creating the climate of intellectual legal opinion and it affected torts as an independent category of law. Some certain lawyer-intellectuals in the development of legal doctrine in America, who were academicians after 1870, significantly affected the content of tort rules and doctrines and also affected the changing state of tort law in America. There are many categories of Torts. It divided three...

Words: 1851 - Pages: 8

Premium Essay

Tort Law Cases

...Tort Law Cases/Assignments Trial Procedures Lewis v. Robinson 2001 BCSC 643 British Columbia Supreme Court The plaintiff, Kenneth Lewis, was a delivery person. He knew that the defendants, Will Robinson and Marci Salach, were the new owners and occupants of the property, but Lewis didn't know that the defendants had a dog. Lewis entered the property and was confronted by Salach and her dog. She was holding the dog's leash at the time. Most times, the dog was chained to its doghouse on the defendants' property. However, on this particular day, Lewis arrived on the property, startling Salach and the dog. Salach asked Lewis to identify himself, received no response, and then warned him that the dog did not like strangers and to be careful. Lewis saw the defendant speaking, but claimed he couldn't hear her as the dog was barking. He tried to pet the dog and then tried to move out of the dog's range when the dog bit his hand. Prior to this incident, the dog had never attacked, bitten, or lunged at strangers, and there was no evidence of complaints from neighbours or friends. Lewis brought an action for damages, but his action was dismissed. For Discussion 1. Why did Lewis bring an action against the defendants . Lewis believed he was entitled to damages for the injury he suffered when the dog bit his hand. 2. Summarize the conflicting evidence. Lewis claimed...

Words: 19246 - Pages: 77

Premium Essay

Tort Law Paper

...Briana Lyles Torts and Product Liability 11/22/2011 University of Maryland – University College AMBA 610 – Section 9040 Dr. Kathleen Locklear Introduction This paper will discuss two types of law and how they apply to two separate lawsuits. According to The Legal Environment of Business: A Critical Approach by Kubasek, Brennan, and Browne, Tort law is defined as “an injury to another’s person or property.” Tort Law has many goals that are in place to assist injured person through monetary compensation and even mental compensation. Additional goals of Tort Law are to discourage private retaliation, promote civility, and deter wrongful actions (Kubasek et al., 2009). Tort Law also tries to ensure that the plaintiff receives compensation for damages. Another type of law explained in The Legal Environment of Business: A Critical Approach is Product and Service Liability Law, which was evolved from Tort Law. Manufacturers of products and givers of service owe a level of responsibility to the consumers of their product or service. The liability laws hold manufacturers accountable if the consumers are somehow unable to use their product without it causing harm to them. The cases discussed in this paper involve Tort Law violations as well as Product and Service Liability law violations on the part of the defendant in both cases. The Facts A CAT scan was performed on Judith Haimes by Dr. Judith Hart, a physician who works at Temple University. Before the CAT scan was performed...

Words: 2966 - Pages: 12