General Negligence - Remoteness Flashcards
Wagon Mound No.1
Ratio: Test for remoteness - what type of loss would a reasonable man in the defendant’s position at the time of the breach have been able to foresee?
Tremain v Pike
Ratio: Specific loss must be foreseeable.
Facts: Contracting Weil’s disease from rat urine was not foreseeable whereas bites and scratches would have been.
Bradford v Robinson
Ratio: Type of loss must be foreseeable.
Facts: Claimant contracted frostbite because his work vehicle had no heating and a broken window. Held that a cold-related injury was foreseeable, did not have to be frostbite.
Lamb v Camden
Ratio: Remoteness is a matter of policy.
Facts: The council flooded Lamb’s house and so she had to move out while the council repaired it. In the meantime squatters moved in. Held that this broke the chain.
Smith v Leech Brain
Ratio: Thin skull rules applies - defendant must take claimant as he finds him.
Facts: Claimant was burned by acid at work. This triggered pre-malignant tumour which killed him. Because the burn was foreseeable, his employer was liable for the cancer.
Corr v IBC
Ratio: Eggshell personality rule applies - psychiatric harm arising from physical harm is foreseeable.
Page v Smith
Ratio: When physical harm is foreseeable, it is unnecessary to ask whether it was foreseeable that psychiatric harm would be suffered.
Lagden v O’Connor
Ratio: Thin wallet rule applies - where the claimant’s impecuniosity means he cannot mitigate, the defendant must accept these costs.
Hughes v Lord Advocate
Ratio: Only type of damage must be foreseeable, not the way it is caused.
Facts: Claimant claimed for burns from knocking paraffin lamp and it exploding. Held that burns from the lamp were foreseeable so it didn’t matter that the explosion was not.
Note - contradicted in Doughty v Turner Manufacturing but followed in A-G v Hartwell.
