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Concept
English tort law
Summary
English tort law concerns the compensation for harm to people's rights to health and safety, a clean environment, property, their economic interests, or their reputations. A "tort" is a wrong in civil law, rather than criminal law, that usually requires a payment of money to make up for damage that is caused. Alongside contracts and unjust enrichment, tort law is usually seen as forming one of the three main pillars of the law of obligations.
In English law, torts like other civil cases are generally tried in front a judge without a jury.
Following Roman law, the English system has long been based on a closed system of nominate torts, such as trespass, battery and conversion. This is in contrast to continental legal systems, which have since adopted more open systems of tortious liability. There are various categories of tort, which lead back to the system of separate causes of action. The tort of negligence is however increasing in importance over other types of tort, providing a wide scope of protection, especially since Donoghue v Stevenson. For liability under negligence, a duty of care must be established owed to a group of persons to which the victim belongs, a nebulous concept into which many other categories are being pulled.
Negligence and Professional negligence
Liability for negligence arises when one person breaches a duty of care owed to another. The main elements of negligence are:
A duty of care (see Donoghue v Stevenson)
Breach of that duty (see Nettleship v Weston)
Breach causing harm in fact (see Smith v Leech Brain & Co.)
The harm must be not too remote a consequence of the breach (see The Wagon Mound (No. 2))
In some situations, defences will be available to negligence. Special rules, and considerable bodies of case law have developed around four further particular fields in negligence: for psychiatric injury, economic loss, for public bodies, and when concerning omissions and third parties.
Duty of care in English law
The establishment of a duty of care is usually broken up into a three-step test.
Official source
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