A legal studies lesson on defences to negligence claims, covering contributory negligence and voluntary acceptance of risk. Uses a supermarket puddle example to illustrate how plaintiffs can partly cause their own harm. Traces negligence law from Donoghue v Stevenson through Australian cases and statutory frameworks like the Wrongs Act.
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All right. Hello, hello, and good morning, everyone, and welcome to our fourth lesson in unit one, Legal studies area study three, Civil liability, where today we're going to be talking about the potential defenses to a negligence claim. Last lesson, we looked at an introduction to tort law and the elements of negligence. So we looked at the fact a duty of care needs to be present, that duty of care needs to be breached, that breach of duty of care needs to have caused some kind of harm, and that injury, loss, or damage need to occur because of that breach of duty of care. We also looked at the limitations of actions in a fair amount of detail, which hopefully you either have some notes on or you have an amazing memory about. So let's get on to possible defenses to negligence. These are pretty simple, easy to talk about, easy to understand. So we'll get into these and we'll have a brief kind of discussion about one of the most famous cases that create the law of negligence. So there are two main possible defenses to negligence. The first one is contributory negligence, where the plaintiff is partly to blame for the harm they have suffered, so their actions partly led to their harm. My usual example for this is that if you went to the supermarket, saw a big puddle on the ground, saw there was no wet floor sign, looked at the camera, looked at the ground, looked at the camera again, smiled, and then ran towards the puddle, and then you slipped and got injured, there is reason to believe that the supermarket probably hasn't breached the duty of care because you clearly knew harm could have occurred by those actions, and you contributed to those actions occurring. And so therefore, you, as the plaintiff, is partly to blame for the harm you have suffered. The second one is the voluntary acceptance of risk. And so the defendant needs to prove the plaintiff was aware of an obvious risk and that they voluntarily chose to take that risk. So being able to be able to prove that, you, as the defendant are aware that the plaintiff knew there was a risk and they chose to take that risk anyway. So with the difference between these two of them, contributory negligence is that the plaintiff's partly to blame, so there's still some duty of care there, and it could have been breached a little bit. And with voluntary acceptance of risk is that that person is proving the plaintiff was clearly aware of the obvious risk and chose to do it anyway. So the role of the law in developing the elements of negligence and their defenses. So in tort law. So in common law, the tort of negligence was established in the English case of 1932 of Donahue and Stevenson and Then was further adopted in Australia in Grant versus the Australian Knitting Mills in 1936 and has been further developed by the courts since then. So Johnny Huber Stevenson is the most famous negligence case. That's where the law of negligence came about to have a little bit of a of piece picture here to explain it further. It was known as the snail in the bottle case where someone bought a bottle of ginger beer and then they gave it to a friend. When the friend took it home and they started drinking it, they drank some out of the bottle. The bottle was opaque so you couldn't see through it. They drank some out of the bottle and it was fine. And then they decided they were going to pour the rest of that into a glass. When they poured it into a glass a decomposed snail came out of the bottle. And basically at that point in time the person became very sick when they saw that they were drinking a decomposed nail as you would. And then at that point in time, if you were a buyer of a product or you were given a product, basically there was no onus for the producer to do anything after that point of sale. And then when they took action about this case, it kind of showed that it was really important that the producer puts out a product that is safe for consumption no matter what. And that's why now you'll see whenever a product isn't fully safe there'll be product recalls because they don't want to be found culpable for negligence or liable for negligence. That was developed through statute law. So the Wrongs act is the main negligence legislation in Victoria and there are statutes that cover negligence such as the Australian Consumer law which is Australia's which is an Australian wide legislation covering fair trading and consumer protection. So basically like if you are given a product that doesn't is faulty or is going to cause injury in some way, you are protected by consumer law. So then lastly we've got possible impacts of negligence. So they can be far reaching. Negligence can be from minor to very, very major cases. So there can be an impact on the plaintiffs. So there could be things like loss of life. There's a video I used to use as a practice assessment where we'd watch an episode of Boston Legal which had a case where a student died because the teacher didn't search for peanut products in their bags and a student had an anaphylactic shock and passed away and the parents sued the teacher because of that loss of life that occurred because of negligence. There can be serious physical injury if someone is negligent in a way that doesn't prevent someone's physical harm, emotional impact and effect on mental health, loss of wages and livelihood and potentially unemployment. If someone can't work for the reasons that someone's been negligent towards them, the impact on the defendant can be that they lose business if they're negligent in some way like especially if they are a food or shopping business. If they are negligent it can make them look very very bad and therefore consumers may turn against them. There can be public humiliation from being found liable of negligence, they can be physical injury and they can be need to pay costs of for basically the plaintiff's injuries and their legal fees, etc. Alright, so that's it for the defence's negligence and possible impacts, as well as how it was developed through comment and statute law. I hope you found this somewhat useful. As always, if you have any questions about any of the content covered today, feel free to leave me a comment below or or send me a message, start a chat, send me an email. More than happy to help. Other than that, I hope you have an excellent day and whenever you're watching this, hopefully a good rest of your week. Have a good one. Goodbye.
