All books in this flagship series contain carefully selected substantial extracts from key cases, legislation, and academic debate, providing able students with a stand-alone resource. This chapter examines the principles of contribution and their effect on the remedies that can be obtained by a successful claimant, as well as the statutory rules of ‘limitation’ that govern the time-barring of claims. The liability of more than one party for ‘the same damage’ is discussed, together with the apportionment of responsibility for the damage. Relevant provisions found in the Civil Liability (Contribution) Act 1978 and the Limitation Act 1980 are also considered.
Chapter
8. Limitation and Contribution
Chapter
9. Damages, Compensation, and Responsibility
All books in this flagship series contain carefully selected substantial extracts from key cases, legislation, and academic debate, providing able students with a stand-alone resource. This chapter deals with remedies, particularly monetary remedies, and remedial issues in relation to torts. Before discussing compensation and responsibility, it first considers the heads of loss for which damages in tort may be awarded, and some serious conceptual difficulties involved with this. It then looks at the potential for non-compensatory awards and the challenge to tort law represented by the growth of damages under the Human Rights Act 1998. It also assesses recent developments with respect to the assessment and delivery of damages, the funding of litigation, and the relationship between tort damages and welfare support.
Chapter
2. Negligence
Celebrated for their conceptual clarity, titles in the Clarendon Law Series offer concise, accessible overviews of major fields of law and legal thought. This chapter discusses the tort of negligence. It elaborates on duty of care based on foreseeability, proximity, assumption of responsibility, property damage and personal injury, purely economic harm, psychiatric harm, less serious upset, and liability for omissions. It argues that the common law duty is higher when it requires a person to take active steps to protect others than when it requires only that he refrain from positively causing an injury. But once it is held that a duty exists, its level is always, apparently, the same: it is the duty to take such care as in all the circumstances of the case is reasonable.
Chapter
7. Defences to Negligence
All books in this flagship series contain carefully selected substantial extracts from key cases, legislation, and academic debate, providing able students with a stand-alone resource. This chapter explores three defences to negligence which are also defences to other torts: volenti non fit injuria or willing assumption of risk, the illegality defence (also known as ex turpi causa), and contributory negligence. In relation to contributory negligence, the chapter considers responsibility, which involves questions both of causal influence and of fault, before turning to a discussion of apportionment of responsibility between the parties, and proportionality. In relation to illegality, recent decisions of the Supreme Court are examined. Relevant provisions of the Law Reform (Contributory Negligence) Act 1945 are extracted, together with further extracts from significant cases.
