Case Database

A manufacturer owes a duty of care to the ultimate consumer of their products. Lord Atkin established the 'neighbour principle' — you must take reasonable care to avoid acts which you can reasonably foresee would injure those closely and directly affected.

Lord Atkin's speech considered the broader moral question of who ought to be your 'neighbour' in law. This broader discussion proved enormously influential in expanding negligence into areas such as psychiatric harm and economic loss.

Prior to 1932, tort law generally required a contractual relationship before a duty of care could exist — the privity rule from Winterbottom v Wright (1842). Mrs Donoghue's claim against a ginger beer manufacturer she had no contract with was therefore radical. The House of Lords' 3-2 majority decision broke with Victorian precedent.

For a murder conviction, the mens rea of intention requires more than foresight of a likely consequence. The defendant must foresee death or grievous bodily harm as a virtual certainty of their actions. Mere foresight of probability is insufficient — it is only evidence from which a jury may infer intent.

Lord Bridge offered a two-stage "golden rule" direction: (1) Was death or serious harm a natural consequence of the defendant's act? (2) Did the defendant foresee it as such? Though this guidance was later criticised in R v Hancock [1986] for being misleading, it shaped the development of the virtual certainty test refined in R v Woollin [1998].

Before Moloney, the law on oblique intent was confused following DPP v Smith [1961], which controversially suggested an objective test for intention. Moloney re-established a subjective approach, asking what the defendant personally foresaw rather than what a reasonable person would have foreseen.

Article 17 of the GDPR (the right to erasure / right to be forgotten) does not require a search engine operator to carry out de-referencing on all versions of its search engine globally. The operator must de-reference on EU-country-code domain versions and take measures to prevent easy access from EU territory on non-EU versions.

The Court acknowledged that EU law does not prohibit a supervisory authority from requiring worldwide de-referencing where national law so permits. This leaves open the possibility of broader territorial reach in future regulatory action, and the Court encouraged international co-operation on this question.

This case arose from the landmark Google Spain SL v AEPD [2014] decision which first established the right to be forgotten under EU data protection law. The French data protection authority (CNIL) had ordered Google to apply de-listing globally, prompting this reference to the CJEU on the territorial scope question.

The Act establishes the Animal Sentience Committee — an independent body charged with scrutinising government policy for its effects on animal welfare. Under s.2, the Committee may produce reports on whether ministers have had 'all due regard' to the welfare of sentient animals. Crucially, the Act extends sentience recognition beyond vertebrates to include decapod crustaceans and cephalopod molluscs (e.g. crabs, octopuses) following scientific evidence from the London School of Economics.

Post-Brexit, the EU's recognition of animal sentience under Article 13 TFEU no longer directly applied in UK law. The 2022 Act was introduced to fill this gap and arguably goes further than its EU counterpart by creating an active scrutiny mechanism rather than merely a declaratory principle. It sits alongside the Animal Welfare Act 2006, which governs individual criminal liability for animal cruelty.

The scientific and philosophical basis for animal sentience has developed significantly since Peter Singer's 'Animal Liberation' (1975) and Jeremy Bentham's earlier observation that the morally relevant question regarding animals is not whether they can reason, but whether they can suffer. The 2022 Act represents a significant legislative shift in how UK law treats non-human welfare interests.

A duty of care arises where: (1) it is reasonably foreseeable that the defendant's careless act would cause harm to the claimant; (2) there is a relationship of proximity between the parties; and (3) it is fair, just and reasonable in all the circumstances to impose a duty. All three requirements must be satisfied — no single element is sufficient alone.

Lord Bridge emphasised that the law should develop incrementally and by analogy with established categories, rather than by application of a single overarching principle. This "incremental approach" was a deliberate retreat from the broader neighbour principle in Donoghue and the two-stage Anns test (Anns v Merton LBC [1978]) which had produced unpredictable expansion of liability.

Caparo arose in the context of negligent auditing — Caparo acquired a company in reliance on accounts prepared by Dickman (auditors) and suffered losses when the accounts proved misleading. The House of Lords held the auditors owed no duty of care to potential investors, as the accounts were prepared for existing shareholders as a class, not for takeover purposes. The case resolved doctrinal uncertainty that had accumulated since Anns v Merton Borough Council [1978].