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1. Duty of Care - Coggle Diagram
1. Duty of Care
Duty = obligation recognized by law.
The breach of the duty and the resulting damage may give rise to liability in negligence.
The breach of a moral or social duty generally does not give rise to liability in negligence.
A customer at a supermarket notice banana skin on the floor of the supermarket but he choose to walk past it, and B, who is in a hurry slips on the banana skin and injures himself. A does not owe a legal duty to warn B or to dispose of the banana skin. A only has a social or moral duty, which is not enforceable by the law. There is generally no duty to rescue a stranger from danger.
However, the proprietor of the supermarket would not be in the same position as A, for he is in a position where he ought to know that leaving an object on the floor of the supermarket could well cause injury to a customer.
Must arise from some “relation” or some “proximity” between the parties. Eg- manufacturer and consumers.
Plaintiff must prove that the Defendant owed a duty of care to the Plaintiff.
To whom is the duty of care owed ?
The duty of care is owed to one’s neighbor
The test
neighborhood principle
Case: DONOGHUE V STEVENSON ( 1932 )
Plaintiff went to his friend house and had a bottle of ginger beer drink.
Plaintiff had consumed some of the drink but when she poured out the remainder of the contents of the bottle, along with the ginger beer came decomposed remain of the snail. Plaintiff suffered shock and subsequently became ill. Plaintiff sued the manufacturer of ginger beer drink.
Issue : whether a manufacturer (Defendant) owe a duty of care to the consumer (Plaintiff) ?
Held: The defendant as a manufacturer owed a duty of care to the Plaintiff as a consumer .
LORD ATKIN : “You must take reasonable care to avoid acts and omission which you can reasonably foresee would be likely to injure your neighbour. Who then, in law is my neighbour. “Person who are so closely affected and directly affected by my act that I ought reasonably to have them in contemplating as being so affected when I am directing my mind to the acts or omission which are called in question.
Grant v Australian Knitting Mills (1936) AC 85
Plaintiffs complained of dermatitis resulting from the use of underpants manufactured by the defendant which contained excess sulphites.
The defendant produced evidence that he had manufactured 4,737,600 pairs of underpants with never a complaint. Yet the court held the plaintiff should succeed.
Held : the manufacturer had to pay because the pants were defective when it left the factory
Anns v Merton London Borough (1978) AC 728
Lord Wilberforce states that there are 2 stages of determining the existence of duty of care.
First, one must ask whether there was a sufficient relationship of “proximity or neighborhood ” between the claimant and defendant such that in the defendant’s reasonable contemplation carelessness on his part might cause damage to the claimant. If so, a prima facie duty of care arose.
Then, at the second stage, it was necessary to consider whether there were any considerations which ought to “negative, or to reduce or limit” that duty.
HOME OFFICE v DORSETT YACHT CLUB
In this case, seven boys had escaped from an island due to the negligence of some Borstal officers. They ran away one night when 3 officials in charge of them, were in bed.
They boarded one of the many vessels in the harbour, stated it and collided with the plaintiff’s yacht, which they then boarded and damaged further. The boys caused damage to the yacht and its owner sued the Home Office.
The house of Lords held the Home Office was liable to total stranger from not protecting them from the revenges of the Borstal boys a close and direct relationship of proximity existed between the officers and owners of the yacht, sufficient to require the officers to take reasonable care to prevent the boys from interfering with yacth and damaging them.