The Law Reform (Contributory Negligence) Act 1945 is an

Act of Parliament Acts of Parliament, sometimes referred to as primary legislation, are texts of law passed by the legislative body of a jurisdiction (often a parliament or council). In most countries with a parliamentary system of government, acts of parliame ...

of the United Kingdom, which allows a judge to apportion liability for compensatory damages as he feels to be "just and equitable" between a tortfeasor and an injured person who was partly to blame. Section 1(1) of the Act provides:

"Where any person suffers damage as the result partly of his own fault and partly of the fault of any other person(s), a claim in respect of that damage will not be defeated by reason of the fault of the person suffering the damage, but the damages recoverable in respect thereof shall be reduced to such extent as the court thinks just and equitable having regard to the claimant's share in the responsibility for the damage."

Historical background

Until the Act was passed,

English tort law English tort law concerns the compensation for harm to people's rights to health and safety, a clean environment, property, their economic interests, or their reputations. A "tort" is a wrong in civil, rather than criminal law, that usually requ ...

had held that

contributory negligence In some common law jurisdictions, contributory negligence is a defense to a tort claim based on negligence. If it is available, the defense completely bars plaintiffs from any recovery if they contribute to their own injury through their own negl ...

was a full defence to negligence. This rule composed what is sometimes called the "unholy trinity" of defences to negligence which wrought particular hardship on 19th century workers, and barred them from any compensation for ghastly workplace injuries (the other two are

common employment Common employment was an historical defence in English tort law that said workers implicitly undertook the risks of being injured by their co-workers, with whom they were in "common employment". The US labor law terminology was the "fellow serva ...

and ''

volenti non fit injuria ''Volenti non fit iniuria'' (or ''injuria'') (Latin: "to a willing person, injury is not done") is a common law doctrine which states that if someone willingly places themselves in a position where harm might result, knowing that some degree of h ...

''). It meant that if an employer was 99% at fault for his worker being mangled in his machinery, but the worker was 1% at fault, then the worker could recover nothing in compensation for injuries. Outside the workplace, an example of the defence is found in '' Waite v North-Eastern Railway Co'' where a grandmother and an infant that were hit by a negligently driven train were barred from any claim. The Act was passed by the new Labour government following

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the World War II by country, vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great power ...

, along with a number of other workplace safety and common law reforms (e.g.,

Law Reform (Personal Injuries) Act 1948 The Law Reform (Personal Injuries) Act 1948 is an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. It was passed during the Labour government of Clement Attlee. It improved the legal position of employees suffering from work-related accidents. In pa ...

). This harsh common law defence subsisted longer in other countries than in the United Kingdom. An example is seen in '' The Wagon Mound (No 1)'' where the claimant conceded that a burning ship accident was unforeseeable in order to avoid the contemporary Australian contributory negligence bar. This 1945 Act was not based on entirely new principles: the Collision Convention of 1910 had already provided that where two ships collide, blame may be apportioned between the two, so that each's contribution to the accident may be calculated to determine the settlement by way of

damages At common law, damages are a remedy in the form of a monetary award to be paid to a claimant as compensation for loss or injury. To warrant the award, the claimant must show that a breach of duty has caused foreseeable loss. To be recognised at ...

. Often, blameworthiness reflected each party's degree of breach of the COLREGS. Normally blame would be apportioned in simple ratios; 50:50, 60:40, 75:25, etc.) Only rarely would the proportion be 100:0, as in '' The Oropesa''. in the UK, before the wearing of car seatbelts become obligatory, difficult legal questions arose when a passenger who failed to wear a seatbelt was injured. If the passenger had voluntarily chosen not to wear a seatbelt, was that person '' volenti'' to the injury? If so, ''volenti'' being a complete defence, the passenger would fail in a claim for negligence. In ''Froom v Butcher'',Case summary /ref>

Lord Denning Alfred Thompson "Tom" Denning, Baron Denning (23 January 1899 – 5 March 1999) was an English lawyer and judge. He was called to the bar of England and Wales in 1923 and became a King's Counsel in 1938. Denning became a judge in 1944 whe ...

MR sliced the

Gordian knot The Gordian Knot is an Ancient Greek legend of Phrygian Gordium associated with Alexander the Great who is said to have cut the knot in 333 BC. It is often used as a metaphor for an intractable problem (untying an impossibly tangled knot) sol ...

by declaring that such a passenger was NOT ''volenti'' but rather was 20% contributorily negligent in the matter. Denning MR declared that "determining whether one is guilty of contributory negligence is a matter not of the cause of the accident, but of the cause of the damage", and he thereby ensured that the injured passenger could successfully claim against the driver's insurance, albeit that the claim would be only 80% of the loss.

Notes

{{Reflist, 2 English tort law United Kingdom Acts of Parliament 1945 United Kingdom tort law Law of negligence Law reform in the United Kingdom

Historical background

See also

Notes