Law Subject Extension: Law of Tort: Part 1

tort law is a collection of legal rules and ideas to protect you from harm and vindicate your rights but you may not have heard of it unless you've already started studying legal ideas the most famous tort is probably the tort of negligence and this module is going to look at a particular case within that tort called nettle ship and Western from 1971 the case concerned the level of care that a driver had to Oh to others both in the car and outside it but the thing was this driver was a learner driver and there were difficult issues engaged about the level of care a learner driver could show you can read this judgment in a moment but what I'd like to do first is introduce you to some of the ideas that we're going to be dealing with within tort law imagine somebody bumps into you and causes you to drop the shopping you're carrying this causes some breakage of bottles and eggs and whatever it is you've got in your shopping while in practice you may not want to litigate what do you do if you do want to litigate so this video is for you if you'd like to find out more about how you would litigate on that so I'm going to ask you a few questions as we go through the idea is that this video is not so much for me because I'm pretty comfortable without my knowledge of this material already but it's for you to try and challenge you to think about some very difficult questions some of which don't actually have certain answers before we get started let's think about the word taught briefly it's not a common word te ort it's not normal you may have heard of a similar word in English called torsion a twisting force and that's the same idea something that's twisted or wrong can you think of any other examples of the use of the word twisted to suggest something that's wrong is someone twisted or do you twist somebody else's words to suggest that you're getting the wrong idea that's the same kind of problem tort law is generally concerned with civil obligations now there are many different ideas on inside that which we might have to unpack first off civil so that means not criminal for this purpose there's many different parts of law and civil and Alaura to the ones you may have heard of so civil law deals with a whole bunch of different parts and one of them is taught other ones you might have heard of are things like contract or potentially unjust enrichment to compare contrasted the other one that you might thought of is criminal law now criminal law is a difficult kind of issue but let's say it deals with the state's power over individuals I also mentioned the word obligations now what does an obligation mean essentially it means that you are bound to do something or not to do something let's pause for a moment there to consider the criminal law briefly there are many different crimes and there are a very large number of torts very often they overlap so the same conduct will both be both a crime and a tort examples you might have heard of our assault or battery it's both the wrong for the criminal law and a wrong in tort law the major difference being the state regards these wrongs in criminal law as being important enough for the state to want to investigate and prosecute and punish let's turn to contract law now contract law can be difficult but as a rough generalization it means that you're entering into an obligation to another person typically voluntarily it's usually a way for you to try to advance your interests in some form of mutual deal sometimes it said that tort law protects health while contract law promotes wealth now there are also in other categories one I'll quickly mention is unjust enrichment now unlike contract and unlike criminal law here we're not necessarily dealing with something that you would call a wrong we're dealing with something that's just happened in some cases so for instance I think I owe someone 10 pounds and I give them 10 pounds it turns out I don't owe them 10 pounds can I get my 10 pounds back it's not necessarily the case that I or they have done anything wrong now we've established roughly where tort law sits and what it's trying to do it's trying to provide compensation and it's trying to vindicate some of the rights that you have but we now need to think a little bit more about how tort law will work in practice and to do that I'd like to go back to the example where you're walking and you carrying some shopping and someone bumps into you they damage some of the shopping does it seem obvious therefore that because they damage the shopping they should have to pay for the damage done that sounds appealing doesn't it well let's pause for a moment to consider some examples where that might no longer sound quite so appealing so one example would be where instead of a simple bumping of the shopping the problem is slightly more complex it turns out the bumper was pushed and knocked into your shopping should you pay then well that's one example let's take a second example the bumper wasn't pushed but through no fault of their own you step out suddenly and they bump into you they couldn't see you you walked out in the most ridiculous fashion and it was not at all their problem in fact really you were the cause of why there was a bump nonetheless your view was they bumped you because you'd stopped moving at just that moment well that's another example should the bumper pay there a third example would be where the bumper slips on some incredibly slippery surface that no one could see at that point they didn't do anything that you might regard as being wrong and they just happen to slip it could have happened to anyone and they bumped into your shopping who should pay for the shopping should the bumper pay the fourth example I'll have to admit it's a bit of a trick I said your shopping and I said the shopping you were carrying but I didn't yet say that you were the owner of the shopping so if we shift this scenario slightly you're still in the supermarket and you haven't actually paid for the shopping yet you're taking it to the counter to pay at that point the property in your shopping bags or shopping basket or shopping trolley actually still belongs to the supermarket so why should the bumper pay you shouldn't they pay the supermarket now those four examples suggest that it's not as simple as saying merely the person who caused damage should pay for it there might be a lot of other things going on all those examples focused on the tort of negligence and I mentioned that was practically one of the most important torts and it's the talk we're going to look at when we look at metal ship and Western but there are other torts so for instance if I say bad things about another person to try and lower what other people think about them that would be the tort of defamation quite possibly similarly if I punch someone that could be the tort of battery if I make them think I'm about to punch them that's the tort of assault and there are many others in most of these that I've just mentioned at least there's some idea of fault that's to say I've done something which other people would regard as wrong it's that fault which is the reason why we make another person pay so in the four examples I gave you in connection with the shopping if the other person the bumper wasn't at fault then we wouldn't want them to pay we don't think it's right there are many other reasons we might consider that someone should pay another for harm done but fault is one of the main ones now that is a starting point there are other conditions that you're going to have to consider one of the other conditions to start out with is that the first person owed the other person a duty to take care now that might sound like a difficult or technical concept it's not really just imagine that there are some situations where English law says you don't have to take care of another person you're allowed to perform the act you're performing to do the things you're doing without worrying about hurting a specific other person but the reality is for the vast majority of situations where it's foreseeable that you might cause another person harm you should take care not to cause them harm it's just it's possible that there are situations where that's not the case can you think of any situations where you shouldn't have to care for another person there are some interesting examples in the case law which you might get to find out about later if you keep looking into tort law one example would be do you think the police are under an obligation to look after everyone in their area that's to say that the police could be liable if someone commits a crime and makes you a victim of a crime or should the police not be able to be sued on the basis that they should have caught the criminal quicker and if you think that then you might think it's because the police did not our duty to take care of you when they are performing their police duties so we've looked at negligence and we've looked at fault we now need to try to understand a little bit more about how you would decide if someone's at fault now the tort of negligence uses a relatively simple standard it says what would the reasonable person do in that situation simple right but how do you decide what the reasonable person would have done in that situation if the reasonable person would have done something and you did the same then you're not liable if you didn't do what a reasonable person did and that caused harm then you might have to pay for that harm but at the end of the day it's not going to be that easy all the time to work out what a reasonable person would do so you and I am sure are pretty reasonable people well I hope we are but nonetheless you and I might disagree about what a reasonable person would do in anyone's situation at the end of the day it's the judge who's going to have to embody the reasonable person and make that decision for them there are many ways we could start to work out what a reasonable person would do and English law has been trying to work it out for quite a long time centuries one American judge a man called Leonard hand very famous judge in the u.s. came up with a test Phillips which got called the learn ed hand formula he tried to work out as if every person were completely rational and what the probability of harm was how bad it would be if the harm happened and contrast that with the precautions and how much they would cost or take in order to be preventing the harm so that was called the Lerner hand for hand formula if it was less effort to take the precautions compared to how likely the harm would be and how bad it would be if the harm happened then a reasonable person would take those precautions and thereby prevent the harm of course that's just a rough guide and in many situations we don't act completely rationally and the laws going to have to take account of that in some ways at the end of the day we're going to say that someone who failed to take reasonable care and whose failure to take care caused damage that the law recognizes we're going to call that person negligent what does it mean to you to hear the word negligent do you think it may something very strong is there a weaker word that you would wish to use like lacking care or is there a stronger word you would wish to use and only use that one for a fan of fault within torte something like gross negligence well perhaps the easiest thing to do is to look in a specific case this is the point that you can read metal ship and Western and then you can turn to video number two and we'll discuss what you found in the case

Channel: Cambridge Law Faculty

Views: 56,509

Rating: 4.9267015 out of 5

Keywords: HE+, subject extension, law, law degree, studying law, law at university, law student, tort, negligence, cambridge university, cambridge law, law faculty, faculty of law, university of cambridge faculty of law

Id: mjoQAXVQ2oQ

Length: 11min 31sec (691 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 02 2016