duty of care

• The purpose of the duty of care is to allow the possibility of legal liability being imposed. The duty of care establishes the range of persons, relationships and interests that should be legally protected from negligently inflicted harm.
• Deciding whether a duty of care exists is an effective way of filtering negligence claims before issues of breach, causation and the amount of damages are considered and this may help reduce the number of claims brought to court.
• The law doesnt impose a duty for a person to act to prevent foreseeable harm, for example to prevent someone from drowning in a river. it only imposes a duty where someone has assumed certain responsibility and created or adopted a risk of harm to others
• causing physical injury and damage to property are normally within the scope of duty of care. financial or other losses that are not direct;ly rel;art ed to physical harm may not be within its scope
• for many years, agter the decision made in caparro v dickman industries, it was thought to be necessary to apply the three stage test in every case to decide if a duty- however, there are 3 criticisms to this test:

  1. the three stage test lacks clarity, making it difficult for lawyers to advise their clients on whether it was worth taking the claim to court and for judges to decide cases in court
  2. The proximity test was never fully established to show who fallls within the proximity of a relationship; by not strictly defining such a relationship new ones can be developed-- this reinforces what lord Macmillan said in Donoghue v Stevenson, "the categories of negligence are never closed".
  3. There is an overlap between the tests of reasonable foreseeability required and the existence of a duty of care and for remoteness of damage
  4. the fair just and reasonable test is vague- hard to predict when a jduge will find it satisfied.
• the decision in robinson v Chief Constable of West Yorkshire seems to have clarified when the caparo test is required- being that only if there is a novel situation, where it has been decided that an established duty exists, the relevant precedent can be applied directly