The four ingredients of any claim in negligence are:
• Defences
DoC is the basis for any claim in negligence law, if a duty doesn't exist there can be no claim. A DoC will exist in the vast majority of situations one can think of. The standard of care varies depending on whether the tortfeasor professed any special skill and, sometimes, on seemingly tangential factors like the existence of insurance as in Nettleship v Weston [1971] 2 QB 691. In rare cases such as the latter, the court departs from its usual inquiry into responsibility and blame and instead adopts a policy of loss distribution. Thus in Nettleship a learner driver was liable for an accident (though clearly they could not be blamed for failing to drive like a fully fledged driver) simply because they were insured.
Click the links above to read about each individual ingredient of a negligence claim.
