 Tawt Law yn llwyddo ddwyllach o'i llwyddoedd cyfnodol i'r hynny o'ch ei wneud i'ch ganddurddau i'ch cyd-fawr, dwi'n wneud i chi'n fawr o'r hyn, dwi'n dweud i'ch dod yn llwyddo ddod o'i llwyddoedd cyfnodol. Mae'r ffamysgawd yw'r llwyddo ddweud o'i llwyddo'r cyfnodol, ac mae'r modl yn ychydig i'r llwyddo'r cyfnodol yn y llwyddo'r cyfnodol called Nettleship and Western from 1971. The case concerned the level of care that a driver had to owe to others both in the car and outside it. The thing was this driver was a learner driver and there were difficult issues engaged about the level of care a learner driver could show. You can read this judgment in a moment but what I'd like to do first is introduce you to some of the ideas that we're going to be dealing with within tort law. Imagine somebody bumps into you and causes you to drop the shopping you're carrying. This causes some breakage of bottles and eggs and whatever it is you've got in your shopping. While in practice you may not want to litigate. What do you do if you do want to litigate? So this video is for you if you'd like to find out more about how you would litigate on that. So I'm going to ask you a few questions as we go through. The idea is that this video is not so much for me because I'm pretty comfortable with my knowledge of this material already but it's for you to try and challenge you to think about some very difficult questions some of which don't actually have certain answers. Before we get started let's think about the word taught briefly. It's not a common word it's not normal. You may have heard of a similar word in English called torsion a twisting force and that's the same idea something that's twisted or wrong. Can you think of any other examples of the use of the word twisted to suggest something that's wrong? Is someone twisted or do you twist somebody else's words to suggest that you're getting the wrong idea? That's the same kind of problem. Tort law is generally concerned with civil obligations. Now there are many different ideas inside that which we might have to unpack first off civil so that means not criminal for this purpose. There's many different parts of law and civil and criminal law are two of the ones you may have heard of so civil law deals with a whole bunch of different parts and one of them is taught. Other ones you might have heard of are things like contract or potentially unjust enrichment. To contrast it the other one that you might thought of is criminal law. Now criminal law is a difficult kind of issue but let's say it deals with the state's power over individuals. I also mentioned the word obligations. Now what does an obligation mean? Essentially it means that you are bound to do something or not to do something. Let's pause for a moment there to consider the criminal law briefly. There are many different crimes and there are a very large number of torts. Very often they overlap so the same conduct will be both a crime and a tort. Examples you might have heard of are assault or battery. It's both the wrong for the criminal law and a wrong in tort law. The major difference being that the state regards these wrongs in criminal law as being important enough for the state to want to investigate and prosecute and punish. Let's turn to contract law. Now contract law can be difficult but as a rough generalisation it means that you're entering into an obligation to another person typically voluntarily. It's usually a way for you to try to advance your interests in some form of mutual deal. Sometimes it's said that tort law protects health while contract law promotes wealth. Now there are also in other categories. One I'll quickly mention is unjust enrichment. Now unlike contract and unlike criminal law here we're not necessarily dealing with something that you would call a wrong. We're dealing with something that's just happened in some cases. So for instance I think I owe someone 10 pounds and I give them 10 pounds. It turns out I don't owe them 10 pounds. Can I get my 10 pounds back? It's not necessarily the case that I or they have done anything wrong. Now we've established roughly where tort law sits and what it's trying to do. It's trying to provide compensation and it's trying to vindicate some of the rights that you have. But we now need to think a little bit more about how tort law will work in practice and to do that I'd like to go back to the example where you're walking and you're carrying some shopping and someone bumps into you. They damage some of the shopping. Does it seem obvious therefore that because they damage the shopping they should have to pay for the damage done? That sounds appealing doesn't it? Well let's pause for a moment and consider some examples where that might no longer sound quite so appealing. So one example would be where instead of a simple bumping of the shopping the problem is slightly more complex it turns out the bumper was pushed and knocked into your shopping. Should he pay then? Well that's one example. Let's take a second example. The bumper wasn't pushed but through no fault of their own you step out suddenly and they bump into you. They couldn't see you. You walked out in the most ridiculous fashion and it was not a tall their problem. In fact really you were the cause of why there was a bump. Nonetheless your view was they bumped you because you'd stopped moving at just that moment. Well that's another example. Should the bumper pay there? A third example would be where the bumper slips on some incredibly slippery surface that no one could see at that point. They didn't do anything that you might regard as being wrong and they just happened to slip it could have happened to anyone and they bumped into your shopping. Who should pay for the shopping? Should the bumper pay? The fourth example I'll have to admit it's a bit of a trick. I said your shopping and I said the shopping you were carrying but I didn't yet say that you were the owner of the shopping. So if we shift this scenario slightly you're still in the supermarket and you haven't actually paid for the shopping yet. You're taking it to the counter to pay. At that point the property in your shopping bags or shopping basket or shopping trolley actually still belongs to the supermarket. So why should the bumper pay you? Shouldn't they pay the supermarket? Now those four examples suggest that it's not as simple as saying merely the person who caused damage should pay for it. There might be a lot of other things going on. All those examples focused on the tort of negligence and I mentioned that was practically one of the most important torts and it's the tort we're going to look at when we look at nettleship and western. But there are other torts so for instance if I say bad things about another person to try and lower what other people think about them that would be the tort of defamation quite possibly. Similarly if I punch someone that could be the tort of battery. If I make them think I'm about to punch them that's the tort of assault and there are many others. In most of these that I've just mentioned at least there's some idea of fault. That's to say I've done something which other people would regard as wrong. It's that fault which is the reason why we make another person pay. So in the four examples I gave you in connection with the shopping if the other person the bumper wasn't at fault then we wouldn't want them to pay. We don't think it's right. There are many other reasons we might consider that someone should pay another for harm done but fault is one of the main ones. Now that is a starting point. There are other conditions that you're going to have to consider. One of the other conditions to start out with is that the first person owed the other person a duty to take care. Now that might sound like a difficult or technical concept. It's not really. Just imagine that there are some situations where English law says you don't have to take care of another person. You're allowed to perform the act you're performing to do the things you're doing without worrying about hurting a specific other person. But the reality is for the vast majority of situations where it's foreseeable that you might cause another person harm you should take care not to cause them harm. It's just it's possible that there are situations where that's not the case. Can you think of any situations where you shouldn't have to care for another person? There are some interesting examples in the case law which you might get to find out about later if you keep looking into tort law. One example would be do you think the police are under an obligation to look after everyone in their area? That's to say that the police could be liable if someone commits a crime and makes you a victim of a crime? Or should the police not be able to be sued on the basis that they should have caught the criminal quicker? And if you think that then you might think it's because the police did not owe a duty to take care of you when they are performing their police duties. So we've looked at negligence and we've looked at fault. We now need to try to understand a little bit more about how you would decide if someone's at fault. Now the tort of negligence uses a relatively simple standard. It says what would the reasonable person do in that situation? Simple right? But how do you decide what the reasonable person would have done in that situation? If the reasonable person would have done something and you did the same then you're not liable. If you didn't do what a reasonable person did and that caused harm then you might have to pay for that harm. But at the end of the day it's not going to be that easy all the time to work out what a reasonable person would do. So you and I I'm sure are pretty reasonable people. Well I hope we are but nonetheless you and I might disagree about what a reasonable person would do in any one situation. At the end of the day it's the judge who's going to have to embody the reasonable person and make that decision for them. There are many ways we could start to work out what a reasonable person would do and English law has been trying to work it out for quite a long time, centuries. One American judge, a man called Learned Hand, a very famous judge in the US, came up with a test for this which got called the Learned Hand formula. He tried to work out as if every person were completely rational and what the probability of harm was, how bad it would be if the harm happened and contrast that with the precautions and how much they would cost or take in order to be preventing the harm. So that was called the Learned Hand formula. If it was less effort to take the precautions compared to how likely the harm would be and how bad it would be if the harm happened then a reasonable person would take those precautions and thereby prevent the harm. Of course that's just a rough guide and in many situations we don't act completely rationally and the law is going to have to take account of that in some ways. At the end of the day we're going to say that someone who failed to take reasonable care and whose failure to take care caused damage that the law recognises we're going to call that person negligent. What does it mean to you to hear the word negligent? Do you think it means something very strong? Is there a weaker word that you would wish to use like lacking care or is there a strong word you would wish to use and only use that one for a foundation of fault within tort something like gross negligence? Well perhaps the easiest thing to do is to look at a specific case. This is the point that you can read Nettleship and Western and then you can turn to video number two and we'll discuss what you found in the case.