hello everyone and welcome to the first of our video tutorials on negligence in today's video we'll be looking at the first element improving negligence duty of care just a reminder then that in order to prove the defendant liable in negligence the claimant has to prove firstly there was a duty of care secondly there was a breach of that duty and thirdly that this resulted in damage but today we're going to focus solely on how you prove duty of care in negligence donahue and stevenson is the first case to look at here because this case established the modern law of negligence and it established the neighbor principle i'm not going to go over the facts again with you here there's a little video link that you can look at to remind yourself of this if you go onto my powerpoint but for now we're just going to focus on the principle from donahue and stevenson so donahue and stevenson was massively important because it was a case that came up with an original precedent that manufacturers of products are duty to the ultimate consumers of their products but this case is also important particularly for duty of care because it established the neighbour principle for deciding when a person would be under duty in this case lord atkin famously said the rule that you are to love your neighbor becomes in law you must not injure your neighbour and the lawyer's question who is my neighbour receives a restricted reply you must take reasonable care to avoid acts or omissions which you can reasonably foresee will be likely to injure your neighbor who then in law is my neighbor the answer seems to be persons who are so closely and directly affected by my act that i ought reasonably to have them in contemplation as being so affected when i am directing my mind to the acts or emissions which are called in question luckily you don't have to memorize the neighbor principle that i've just read out but the reason that i've read it out to you is to show you that the neighbor principal was basically saying that you are with duty of care to anyone who is close to you and that you can reasonably foresee is likely to be injured by your acts or emissions but you could hear there from what lord atkins said that the neighbour principle is quite waffly and not very clear so in the next case of caparo and dickman the judges took the opportunity to give a much clearer test for establishing when a duty of care would be owed so in caparro and dickman the neighbour test or the neighbour principle was replaced by a three-part test for establishing a duty of care so you have to firstly look was the damage your home reasonably foreseeable was there sufficient proximity meaning closeness between the claimant and the defendant and is it fair just unreasonable to impose a duty and what we need to do now is look at some cases that help to illustrate each of these stages so we're going to start by looking at how do we work out if the damage or harm was reasonably foreseeable this case unreasonably foreseeable is the case of kenton griffiths and this is where the claimant was suffering an asthma attack and an ambulance took 30 minutes to arrive and the principle from this case was that it was reasonably foreseeable that a claimant would suffer some harm of the failure of the ambulance service to arrive in a reasonable amount of time jolie and sutton you can see that the council had some land where there'd been an old boat abandoned and the council knew about it they knew it was all dilapidated and but they left it there and some 14 year old children were playing on the boat and one of the boys actually propped the boat up um and was underneath it pretending to be a mechanic or something and unfortunately the boat fell on him and he was left paralyzed and the issue here was was this reasonably foreseeable and the council were trying to argue that it wasn't reasonably foreseeable how could they possibly predict that someone would lift a boat up climb underneath it and be injured when it fell on them and you can sort of see their point there however the house of lords in this case said that it was reasonably foreseeable that some injury would occur if children played on or around it and so the defendants had been negligent so they were sort of saying that you didn't have to foresee the precise type of harm but you just had to foresee that some injury would occur clinton griffiths and jolly and sutton then both of these cases the court decided that the harm was reasonably foreseeable so it's nice to contrast those cases with a case where there was a different outcome where it was held not to be reasonably foreseeable and this is the case of bull hill and young and in this situation we had a motorcyclist who was speeding and he was involved in a crash and killed and mrs borehill was about eight months pregnant at the time and she was 50 yards away from the accident she heard it but she didn't see any of it but afterwards she did see some of the motorcyclists blood on the road she went into shock and her baby was born stillborn and she was trying to claim for the stillbirth of her baby against the motorcyclist's estate in other words that his negligence had resulted in the loss of her baby now you can see here from the principle that the court held that the motorcyclist didn't owe her a duty because it wasn't reasonably foreseeable that she'd be affected because she didn't actually see the accident she wasn't involved so it was not reasonably foreseeable in that case if considered reasonably foreseeable the second stage in the caparro test is that you have to prove proximity and that means closeness in terms of physical space time or also relationship so in home office and dorset yacht the defendants owed a duty of care to people who owned property nearby and that was because there was physical closeness through time and space so this is quite a useful case because it shows that if your defendant is physically close to the claimant then there will be proximity but sometimes of course you're not going to have physical proximity and the issue arises as to whether there should be legal proximity so we'll have a look at that and this is where we need to consider proximity in the police so we've got the very famous case here hill and the chief constable of south yorkshire and this is peter sutcliffe here also known as the yorkshire ripper and this case was really interesting because jacqueline hill was the final victim of peter sutcliffe and he'd committed 13 murders and eight attempted murders over a five-year period so jacqueline's mother that's why we've got hill here um made a claim against the chief constable of police on the grounds that the police had been negligent in the detection and detention of salt cliff in other words that they should have apprehended him sooner um and so the court had to decide here was there sufficient proximity between jacqueline hill's mum and the police and you can see here that the court decided that there wasn't proximity because they had no way of knowing who the next victim might be we always compare the case of hill to the case of osman and ferguson and in this case we had a school teacher who formed an unhealthy attachment to a 14 year old pupil and became obsessed with him and started to harassing this pupil and his family this boy and his family reported the matter to the police but they didn't take any action and unfortunately on one particular occasion the teacher came over um to the home of the boy and his family and he shot the boy and his dad now the boy survived but sadly the father passed away and the issue here was did the police owe a duty to the family um and in hill if you remember um they had no way of knowing who the next victim might be but osman was different because the family had already repeat reported to the police what had been going on and the police had done nothing so on this occasion there was a sufficiently proximate proximate relationship because the police knew that there was a real risk to that school boy and to his family you'll notice here though that although there was proximity in the case of osman notting hill but although there was proximity in osmen these cases also failed on stage three of the caparro test because it was held that even if there was proximity it wasn't fair just unreasonable to impose the duty of care on the police so this raises an important point that in order to wear a duty of care you have to meet all three parts so it has to be reasonably foreseeable you have to have proximity and it has to be fair just and reasonable so even in osmen where it was reasonably foreseeable we had proximity it can still fail on stage three which i think is illustrating how difficult it can be to prove negligence that leads us on then to the final stage of the capare test that in order to prove a duty of care it must be fair just unreasonable and the courts are usually reluctant to impose a duty on public authorities such as the police so as i've just mentioned in both osmond and in hill it was held to be not fair just unreasonable to impose a duty on the police because it was felt that it could lead to policing being carried out in a defensive way so reluctance there to impose a duty on the police and for a long time people sort of thought that hill gave blanket immunity to the police and what i mean by blanket immunity is that we sort of thought that because of hill you'd never really be able to prove a negligence case against the police because you wouldn't be able to prove duty of care however we've had a really interesting recent case um on our next slide here robinson and the chief constable of west yorkshire and this lady here mrs robinson was severely injured when two policemen fell on top of her whilst they were negligently trying to arrest a suspected drug dealer now this went through the courts and it went to the court of appeal and the court of appeal applied hill um and using hill they said okay it was reasonably foreseeable okay there was proximity there's obviously physical proximity if they've fallen on top of her but they said it wouldn't be fair just unreasonable to impose the duty on the police now this lady appealed to the supreme court and the supreme court had a look at the decision and lord reed emphasized that hill doesn't grant the police general immunity and he found the police had been negligent in this case and he said that the police can be liable for negligence resulting in personal injury so this is all a little bit tricky for us lawyers now because they're just unreasonable and we've not got a clear answer with the police now if you apply hillary osmond it won't be fair just unreasonable on police but if you apply robinson it can be fair just unreasonable so if you get a scenario with the police in it in the exam the best answer you can give is it may not meet this part of the test using osmond and hill however it may follow robinson and we may be able to prove fair just unreasonable and that's going to be your best answer so we finished looking at duty of care there they're all the cases you need to know on this slide i've just summarised what we've been through because there is quite a lot to it so this diagram is showing that in order to find duty of care we start with the donahue and stevenson neighbour principle that you owe a duty to those persons that are closely affected by your actions this has since been replaced with the caparro three-stage test and firstly you have to prove it was reasonably foreseeable and it was reasonably foreseeable in kent and jolly but it was not reasonably foreseeable in bull hill and young stage two you've got to prove proximity and that can be physical or legal proximity we had home office and dorset yacht and osman and ferguson said there was proximity but hill and west yorkshire there was not proximity and then our final stage fair just unreasonable and we saw our general rule it was shown in hill and also in osman that usually it's not fair just unreasonable to impose a duty on the police but it will be following robinson so we've not got a clear answer i should just point out that it will always be fair just unreasonable to put a duty on someone who is not a public authority like the police if it's just an ordinary person that'll always meet that test it's only police really that we've got this question hanging over us okay so that's duty of care have a look at the next video on breach of duty