Essential Cases: Criminal Law provides a bridge between course textbooks and key case judgments. This case document summarizes the facts and decision in R v Ireland; R v Burstow [1998] AC 147, House of Lords. The document also included supporting commentary from author Jonathan Herring.
Chapter
R v Ireland; R v Burstow [1998] AC 147, House of Lords
Chapter
3. Duty of care II: bodily injury and psychiatric illness
This chapter discusses the duties of care in negligence that must be pleaded where the claimant has suffered some kind of personal injury—principally cases of bodily injury and psychiatric illness. The law imposes a wide duty with respect to persons who are physically proximate and vulnerable to injury. The law imposes a wide duty of care also upon persons who imperil others’ physical safety and cause them, as persons in the ‘zone of danger’, to suffer psychiatric illness. By contrast, the law has imposed certain ‘control mechanisms’ on the duty of care as it applies to secondary victims (who were outside the zone of danger but have suffered psychiatric injury). These mechanisms involve stringent types of proximity (as to relationships, presence, and sensory experience) in addition to the requirement of foreseeability to persons of the type of psychiatric illness.
Chapter
10. Non-fatal offences against the person
This chapter examines non-fatal offences that range from a trivial tap on the shoulder to levels of harm threatening life itself. While the relevant offences are archaic in their definition and lacking in any coherent structure, they are extremely important because they are frequently prosecuted and they also give rise to interesting questions on issues central to the criminal law, such as how the autonomy of the individual should be respected. The chapter considers whether psychiatric illness can amount to an offence against the person; what level of harm constitutes ‘actual’ bodily harm as opposed to ‘grievous’ bodily harm; and whether actual bodily harm must be ‘inflicted’ or merely caused. Finally, the chapter examines the criminalization of disease transmission. This also chapter examines the controversial question of whether and, if so, when a sane adult should be permitted to consent to harm to himself or to the risk of harm to himself. It considers the threshold of harm—should V be permitted to consent to any level of harm or only to minor harms; whether a person should be permitted to consent to different levels of harm in certain activities: surgery, boxing, horseplay, etc; whether the transmission or risk of transmission of diseases or infections can be consented to; and what constitutes ‘true’ consent.
Chapter
7. Negligence: Duty of Care—Psychiatric Illness
Donal Nolan and Ken Oliphant
This chapter examines liability for psychiatric illness in negligence, and in particular the limits that are placed on claims for such illness at the duty of care stage. It considers liability to a person who was involved as a participant in the traumatic event (‘primary victim’ cases); liability to a person who witnessed the death, injury or imperilment of a third party (‘secondary victim’ cases); and other types of case, such as illness caused by stress at work. The chapter concludes with an evaluation of the current law in this area and a consideration of proposals that have been made for its reform.
