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Which of the following circumstances will prevent causality being established in a claim of negligence?
A. An act of the claimant that is unreasonable and outside the normal course of things
B. Acts of a third party that occur after the claimant’s injury
C. Foreseeable natural events
D. Multiple possible reasons for the injury with no one act being established as the causeI have no doubt about the correct answer D as in the model answer. However, option A also sounds correct since only reasonable and within normal course of things act will not break the chain. Unreasonable and outside normal course one should also prevent establishment of causality, shouldn’t it?
Please help me clarifying this,
Thank you.Hmmm! Yet another tricky question, Iniss! Where are you finding these ?
The three elements of a successful claim for negligence are:
Existence of a duty of care and breach of that duty
Direct consequential loss resulting from a breach of the duty
Application by the Court of the ‘But for’ testIn your post, and applying the three elements to your question, I can suggest only that the ‘apparent’ negligence was in breach of the duty of care and that the unreasonable and unusual act of the claimant should nevertheless have been anticipated by the ‘negligent’ defendant
I have two further comments:
Are you sure that you have transcribed the question correctly?, and
In an exam, there is a chance that I would have seriously considered selecting option A (options B and C are clearly incorrect) although option D is clearly correct whereas option A is only ‘potentially’ correctDoes that make sense?
Oh that really makes sense. Yeah in the exam, clearly correct answer should be chosen but plausible option really makes me confused.
I also found out that:
Option A only breaks the chain of causation: disrupts the direct link between defendant’s negligence and claimant’s injury but does not prevent causality wholly.
Option D involves multiple reasons but no act can be established as the cause and so no causality exists at all.I agree with the above answer. I am curious about the practical implications. For example I believe I read somewhere that at present the majority of female lung cancer cases in the UK are in women that are non-smokers and have never smoked even though it is established that smoking does substantially raise the chances of an individual contracting lung cancer.
But this surely confirms the premise that, if the Courts cannot attribute causation to any individual source, the Courts will not assign causality to any specific single source where many could have contributed
I think you are right. They do seem to have made an exception in some asbestos cases-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairchild_v_Glenhaven_Funeral_Services_Ltd
The above is referred to as the Fairchild exception. Also it’s more about being unable to pinpoint which employer is responsible for the damage as a result of negligence not the cause of the disease.
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