Negligence

Source - WikiPedia

The tort of negligence is a cause of action leading to relief designed to protect legal rights[g] from actions which, although unintentional, nevertheless cause some form of legal harm to the plaintiff. In order to win an action for negligence, a plaintiff must prove: duty, breach of duty, causation, scope of liability, and damages. Further, a defendant may assert various defences to a plaintiff’s case, including comparative fault and assumption of risk. Negligence is a tort which arises from the breach of the duty of care owed by one person to another from the perspective of a reasonable person. Although credited as appearing in the United States in Brown v. Kendall, the later Scottish case of Donoghue v Stevenson [1932] AC 562, followed in England, brought England into line with the United States and established the 'tort of negligence' as opposed to negligence as a component in specific actions.[24] In Donoghue, Mrs. Donoghue drank from an opaque bottle containing a decomposed snail and claimed that it had made her ill. She could not sue Mr. Stevenson for damages for breach of contract and instead sued for negligence. The majority determined that the definition of negligence can be divided into four component parts that the plaintiff must prove to establish negligence.

In most common law jurisdictions, there are four elements to a negligence action:[25]

1. duty: the defendant has a duty to others, including the plaintiff, to exercise reasonable care[h]
2. breach: the defendant breaches that duty through an act or culpable omission
3. damages: as a result of that act or omission, the plaintiff suffers an injury
4. causation: the injury to the plaintiff is a reasonably foreseeable[i] consequence of the defendant's act or omission under the proximate cause doctrine.[j]

Some jurisdictions narrow the definition down to three elements: duty, breach and proximately caused harm.[30] Some jurisdictions recognize five elements, duty, breach, actual cause, proximate cause, and damages.[30] However, at their heart, the various definitions of what constitutes negligent conduct are very similar. Depending on jurisdiction, product liability cases such as those involving warranties may be considered negligence actions or fall under a separate category of strict liability torts. Similarly, cases involving environmental or consumer health torts which other countries treat as negligence or strict liability torts are treated in India as absolute liability torts.

In establishing whether a duty of care exists, different common law jurisdictions have developed a variety of distinct but related approaches, with many jurisdictions building on the test established in Anns v Merton LBC. In Singapore, the current leading case is Spandeck Engineering v Defence Science and Technology Agency, which builds on Anns by establishing a two step test comprising an analysis of proximate cause and public policy as a universal test, independent from the individual circumstances of a given case, for determining the existence of a duty of care. The Supreme Court of Canada established a similar test in the context of assessing damages for pure economic loss owing to negligence derived from Anns which consists of a two step examination of the existence of a sufficiently proximate relationship between the parties and public policy considerations; however, the Canadian test is more sensitive to the individual circumstances of a given case and the first step is generally deemed to be met where a case falls into one of three sets of circumstances recognised by precedent while the Singaporean test is independent of precedent. In English tort law, Caparo Industries plc v Dickman established a tripartite test for the existence of a duty of care per which harm must be reasonably foreseeable as a potential result of the defendant's conduct; the parties must be in a relationship of proximity; and it must be fair, just, and reasonable to impose such a duty.