Tort Law

Tort Law Negligence Cases Every UK Law Student Must Know

The key negligence cases, tests, and exam traps explained clearly for LLB and SQE candidates.

Negligence is the engine of tort law, and examiners know it. Get the structure wrong and you lose marks even when you know the cases. Get it right and you can answer almost any problem question on the paper.

The Three-Part Structure You Cannot Ignore

Every negligence claim runs through the same three questions:

1. Did the defendant owe the claimant a duty of care?
2. Did the defendant breach that duty?
3. Did the breach cause the claimant's damage, and was that damage not too remote?

That sounds obvious, but students consistently blur these stages together. Causation and remoteness are not the same thing. Duty and breach are not the same thing. Keep the boxes separate in your answer and you immediately signal to the examiner that you know what you're doing.

Duty of Care: From Donoghue to Caparo

The foundational case is [Donoghue v Stevenson [1932] AC 562](https://www.getcaselaw.com/case-library/7c984837-f0b3-4afc-a73f-3ec96f6e4756). Mrs Donoghue drank ginger beer containing a decomposed snail. She couldn't sue in contract because her friend bought the drink. So Lord Atkin established that a manufacturer owes a duty of care to the ultimate consumer, even without a contractual relationship. His neighbour principle, that you must take reasonable care to avoid acts or omissions which you can reasonably foresee would injure your neighbour (people closely and directly affected by your act), is the conceptual seed from which modern negligence grew.

For decades, courts expanded duty freely. Then Anns v Merton LBC [1978] AC 728 created a two-stage test that arguably went too far, and the House of Lords quietly reversed course in Murphy v Brentwood DC [1991] 1 AC 398, restricting recovery for pure economic loss in particular.

The test you actually use in exams today is the Caparo three-stage test from Caparo Industries plc v Dickman [1990] 2 AC 605:

• Foreseeability: Was harm to this claimant reasonably foreseeable?
• Proximity: Was there a sufficiently close relationship between claimant and defendant?
• Fair, just and reasonable: Is it fair, just and reasonable to impose a duty in these circumstances?

Caparo is not a mechanical checklist. Courts treat it as a framework for incremental development by analogy to existing categories. That matters for exam technique: if you're dealing with an established category (road accidents, medical negligence, employer/employee), just say the duty is well established and move on. Caparo analysis is most valuable when the duty is novel or contested.

Where Duty Gets Complicated

Three situations trip students up repeatedly.

Pure economic loss. Tort does not generally cover financial loss unaccompanied by physical damage or property damage. Spartan Steel & Alloys Ltd v Martin & Co [1973] QB 27 is the classic. The defendant negligently cut a power cable; the claimant lost profit on a melt already in progress (recoverable as consequential loss on physical damage) but could not recover for lost profit on subsequent melts (pure economic loss). The exception is negligent misstatement, governed by Hedley Byrne & Co Ltd v Heller & Partners Ltd [1964] AC 465, where a special relationship of reliance exists.

Psychiatric injury. This area has its own rules entirely. The law distinguishes primary victims from secondary victims. A primary victim is someone who was within the zone of physical danger. For primary victims, [Page v Smith [1995] UKHL 7](https://www.getcaselaw.com/case-library/72b15ac1-6d7c-4cec-84d5-c3b607e50a72) holds that as long as some personal injury was foreseeable, the defendant is liable for psychiatric injury even if physical injury did not materialise. Secondary victims, by contrast, must satisfy the control mechanisms from Alcock v Chief Constable of South Yorkshire [1992] 1 AC 310: proximity of relationship to the primary victim, proximity in time and space to the accident, and perception through their own unaided senses. Alcock itself arose from the Hillsborough disaster; the claimants were relatives of victims who watched on television and failed on the perception requirement.

Omissions and third-party acts. There is generally no liability for a pure omission or for failing to prevent harm caused by a third party. The exceptions require a special relationship or assumption of responsibility. Stovin v Wise [1996] AC 923 and the Dorset Yacht Co v Home Office [1970] AC 1004 illustrate the boundary: the Home Office had a sufficient degree of control over the borstal boys who damaged the yacht, so a duty arose.

Breach: The Reasonable Person Standard

Once you have a duty, the question is whether the defendant fell below the standard of the reasonable person. Blyth v Birmingham Waterworks Co (1856) 11 Ex Ch 781 gives you the classic formulation: negligence is doing something the reasonable person would not do, or failing to do something the reasonable person would do.

The standard is objective but context-sensitive:

• A professional is held to the standard of a reasonable professional in that field. Bolam v Friern Hospital Management Committee [1957] 1 WLR 582 established the professional standard in medical negligence: a doctor is not negligent if they act in accordance with a responsible body of medical opinion. But Bolitho v City and Hackney HA [1998] AC 232 added that the court can reject a body of opinion if it cannot withstand logical scrutiny.
• A learner driver is held to the standard of a competent driver, not a learner. Nettleship v Weston [1971] 2 QB 691.
• Children are judged against the standard of a reasonable child of the same age. Mullin v Richards [1998] 1 WLR 1304.

The risk calculus from Bolton v Stone [1951] AC 850 and the US-influenced formulation in The Wagon Mound cases tells you to weigh up:

• The probability of harm occurring
• The severity of potential harm
• The social utility of the defendant's conduct
• The cost of precautions

Paris v Stepney BC [1951] AC 367 is useful here. The claimant had one eye. The risk of total blindness was therefore much higher than for a two-eyed worker, and the employer's failure to provide goggles was a breach even though goggles might not have been required for a fully sighted employee.

Causation: More Than "But For"

The basic test is the but-for test: but for the defendant's breach, would the claimant have suffered the damage? Barnett v Chelsea & Kensington Hospital Management Committee [1969] 1 QB 428 is the textbook illustration. A nurse turned away a man who later died of arsenic poisoning. The hospital was in breach, but evidence showed he would have died regardless of treatment. No causation. Claim failed.

The but-for test breaks down in certain situations. Two are particularly important for exams.

Multiple sufficient causes. If two defendants each independently expose the claimant to a risk, and the scientific evidence cannot isolate which caused the damage, the but-for test would exonerate both. Fairchild v Glenhaven Funeral Services [2002] UKHL 22 addressed this in the mesothelioma context by allowing a claim on the basis of material contribution to risk, not just material contribution to damage. Barker v Corus [2006] UKHL 20 then apportioned liability, before Parliament intervened with the Compensation Act 2006, s.3 to restore joint and several liability in asbestos cases. Know this sequence.

Material contribution to damage (distinct from risk) is relevant where a defendant's breach made a contribution to an indivisible injury even if it was not the sole cause. Bonnington Castings Ltd v Wardlaw [1956] AC 613 is the House of Lords authority. The claimant inhaled silica dust from both a guilty source (pneumatic hammers) and an innocent source. The guilty source materially contributed to the overall damage, so liability was established.

Remoteness: The Wagon Mound Test

Even where causation is proven, the defendant is only liable for damage that is a reasonably foreseeable consequence of the breach. This comes from The Wagon Mound (No 1) [1961] AC 388. Furnace oil spilled into Sydney Harbour; sparks from welding ignited it and burned the plaintiff's wharf. The Privy Council held that damage by fire was not a reasonably foreseeable consequence of an oil spillage, so the defendants were not liable.

The key points for exam answers:

• You only need to foresee the type of damage, not the precise manner or extent. Hughes v Lord Advocate [1963] AC 837: a child burned himself falling into a manhole; the risk was burns from the lamp, and burns by explosion was not so different a type as to be unforeseeable.
• The thin skull rule (or eggshell skull rule) cuts across remoteness. If the type of damage is foreseeable, the defendant takes the claimant as they find them and is liable for the full extent, even if greater than expected. Smith v Leech Brain & Co [1962] 2 QB 405.

This is where Page v Smith becomes critical again. Because Page was a primary victim, the foreseeability of physical injury was enough to make psychiatric injury recoverable without separately asking whether psychiatric injury was foreseeable. It's an exception to the usual remoteness inquiry, and examiners love testing whether you can identify it.

Defences Worth Knowing Cold

Negligence questions often include a partial defence element, especially in SQE1 problem questions.

Contributory negligence under the Law Reform (Contributory Negligence) Act 1945 reduces damages proportionately. Sayers v Harlow UDC [1958] 1 WLR 623 is a solid example: a woman trapped in a toilet cubicle injured herself trying to climb out. She contributed to her own injury. Damages reduced by 25%.

Volenti non fit injuria (consent) is a complete defence. The claimant must have full knowledge of the risk and freely agreed to accept it. ICI v Shatwell [1965] AC 656. It's rarely successful in employer/employee cases because employees rarely have genuinely free choice.

Illegality (ex turpi causa) can defeat a claim entirely where the harm arose directly from the claimant's own illegal act. Pitts v Hunt [1991] 1 QB 24: a pillion passenger who encouraged dangerous driving could not claim when the driver crashed.

How Examiners Frame Negligence Questions

In problem questions, the facts will include either a clear established duty situation or a deliberately unusual one. Your job is to spot which it is and respond accordingly. Don't spend half your answer applying Caparo to a straightforward road accident. Do spend time on Caparo if the defendant is a public authority, an adviser, or someone accused of failing to prevent third-party harm.

In essay questions, you might be asked whether the Caparo test has been applied consistently. The honest answer is: not really. Later cases like Robinson v Chief Constable of West Yorkshire Police [2018] UKSC 4 brought things back to an incremental, precedent-based approach and the Supreme Court signalled scepticism about treating Caparo as a universal formula. That's worth knowing for upper-second territory.

The Caselaw Tort Law topic hub is a clean way to cross-reference the full range of cases across negligence, nuisance and beyond. If you need to pull up a specific judgment quickly, the case finder tool saves time when you're revising from a reading list.

One last thing. The structure matters as much as the knowledge. Duty, breach, causation, remoteness, defences. Work through them in order. Don't mix your causation analysis into your duty section because you found a good case there. Examiners follow the structure when they mark, and your answer should make that easy for them.