Caparo Industries plc v Dickman [1990] UKHL 2 – Law Journals

Duty of care: Not responsible?

Rajkiran Barhey reports that in some circumstances the door may be open to claims by children against local authorities if they fail to protect them from third parties ‘The claimants argued that, in purporting to investigate the risk that the neighbours posed and in attempting to monitor the claimants’ situation, the council assumed responsibility for …

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Negligence: Developments in parent company liability

Harry Sheehan analyses the recent Supreme Court decision of Vedanta ‘A parent company may not only be directly liable for harm caused as a result of flawed policies or systems it has designed, but also by a failure properly to implement and enforce policies or systems it has designed even when they are not flawed.’ …

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Practice: When is the law not the law?

David Cook seeks certainty from the Supreme Court ‘Conventional wisdom and common practice over time had effectively distilled Lord Dunedin’s Dunlop tests into an unhelpful, over-simplified distinction.’ It sounds like the beginning of a bad joke, but it is no laughing matter that a recent run of Supreme Court cases serve to demonstrate that conventional …

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Breach of duty: Saying the wrong thing

Shahram Sharghy reports on a case that concerned whether a duty of care was owed by a non-medically-trained receptionist ‘As soon as the claimant had been “booked in”, he entered into a relationship with the defendant of patient and healthcare provider. The scope of the duty extends to taking reasonable care not to provide misleading …

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Human rights: Claims against the police post Robinson and DSD – part two

In the second part of a two-part analysis, John-Paul Swoboda outlines the decision in Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis v DSD and looks at the wider impact on claims against the police ‘The case for the claimants was that as the state has a duty under Art 3 to conduct an effective investigation into …

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Duty of care: Claims against the police post Robinson and DSD – part one

In part one of a two-part analysis of claims against the police, John-Paul Swoboda examines the decision in Robinson and whether the police are exempt from negligence claims ‘Lord Reed and the other Supreme Court justices recognised that not too high a standard ought to be imposed on the police, but those observations did not …

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Negligent misstatement: Bouncing bunnies

Andrew Burnette looks at liability and the unknown: can the provider of a reference be responsible if it doesn’t know who will rely on it? ‘Taking into consideration the principles set out in both Hedley Byrne and Caparo, the Supreme Court found that in the circumstances of the Playboy case it simply was not possible …

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Contracting: Parenting problems

Gwendoline Davies and Malcolm Simpson look at jurisdiction and the liability of parent companies for international subsidiaries ‘In order to proceed with a claim in the UK, the claimants in Lungowe and Okpabi had to establish that the UK parent companies were liable in tort for the acts or omissions of their international subsidiaries.’ The …

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Liability: Pure omissions and public authorities

Ruth Kennedy considers the basis upon which liability can be established ‘The general principle is that there is no liability for the wrongdoing of a third party, even where that wrongdoing is foreseeable.‘ This article focuses on liability for pure omissions in tort with a particular focus on public authorities. The general principle of the …

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Case review: Clinical negligence update

Dr Simon Fox QC provides a summary of all the important cases from 2017 ‘In ABC, the court considered the public interest, duty of confidentiality to the father, undermining of the doctor-patient relationship, pressure on patients to agree to disclosure, psychiatric harm to non-patients, burden on medical staff and incremental manner of development of the …

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