| Wilkinson v Downton | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Court | High Court of Justice |
| Decided | 8 May 1897 |
| Citation(s) |
|
| Cases cited | Lynch v Knight(1861)9 HLC 577, 11 ER 854 (17 July 1861) |
| Court membership | |
| Judge(s) sitting | Wright J |
| Keywords | |
| Mental shock | |
Wilkinson v Downton [1897] EWHC 1(QB) , [1897] 2 QB 57 is an English tort law decision in which the Common Law first recognised the tort of intentional infliction of mental shock. At the time, this was not covered under the law of negligence.
Thomas Wilkinson was the landlord of the Albion public house in Limehouse, London. A regular customer of the public house, named Mr Downton, decided to play a practical joke on Wilkinson's wife. When Mr Wilkinson went to see the races in Harlow, Essex, he left his wife to manage the house. Downton approached Mrs Wilkinson and told her, falsely, that her husband had been seriously injured in an accident. He said that Mr Wilkinson had suffered two broken legs, and was lying at The Elms in Leytonstone. He told Mrs Wilkinson that she should go to her husband in a cab and bring two pillows to carry him home.
The effect of Downton's false statement to Mrs Wilkinson was a violent shock to her nervous system, causing her to vomit and for her hair to turn white and other more serious and permanent physical consequences which at one point threatened her reason, and entailing weeks of suffering and incapacity to her as well as expense to her husband for medical treatment. These consequences were not in any way the result of a history of bad health or weakness of constitution; nor was there any evidence of predisposition to nervous shock or any other idiosyncrasy.
Mrs Wilkinson sued on an action on the case.
Mr Justice Wright held that Mrs Wilkinson had a valid claim for the intentional infliction of mental shock, and awarded her £100. She was entitled to a small claim for 1s 10½d for the cost of railway fares of persons sent by the plaintiff to Leytonstone in obedience to the false statement. As to this 1s 10½d expended in railway fares on the faith of the defendant's statement, the statement was a misrepresentation intended to be acted on to the damage of the plaintiff.
Furthermore, Wright J observed that since there was no physical touching there could be no grounds for a claim in battery, and as Mrs Wilkinson did not apprehend any immediate physical violence, no claim would lie in common law assault. He gave two requirements for an action in nervous shock, basing it on the physical harm that flowed from the shock. The defendant has to have wilfully done an act "calculated to cause physical harm to the plaintiff". And the defendant has to have in fact caused physical harm to the plaintiff. The degree of intention is not read narrowly. The question is "whether the defendant's act was so plainly calculated to produce some effect of the kind which was produced."
The defendant has, as I assume for the moment, wilfully done an act calculated to cause physical harm to the plaintiff—that is to say, to infringe her legal right to personal safety, and has in fact thereby caused physical harm to her. That proposition without more appears to me to state a good cause of action...
The reasoning in Wilkinson was upheld by the Court of Appeal of England and Wales in 1919 in Janvier v Sweeney . [1] During the First World War, Mlle Janvier lived as a paid companion in a house in Mayfair, London, and corresponded with her German lover who was interned as an enemy alien on the Isle of Man. Sweeney was a private detective who wanted secretly to obtain some of her employer's documents and sent his assistant to induce her to co-operate by pretending to be from Scotland Yard and saying that the authorities wanted her because she was corresponding with a German spy. Mlle Janvier suffered severe nervous shock from which she took a long time to recover. The jury awarded her £250.
The House of Lords later summarized the nature of the tort in Wainwright v Home Office , a case concerning a young man with cerebral palsy who had been strip-searched before visiting his brother in prison. Lord Hoffmann, in his speech, declared that "It does not provide a remedy for distress which does not amount to recognized psychiatric injury and so far as there may be a tort of intention under which such damage is recoverable, the necessary intention was not established. I am also in complete agreement ... that Wilkinson v Downton has nothing to do with trespass to the person." [2]
In 2015, the United Kingdom Supreme Court reviewed the jurisprudence surrounding Wilkinson, in the case Rhodesv OPO [2015] UKSC 32 and held that it could not be used to override the freedom to report the truth. [3] In the leading judgment, Lady Hale and Lord Toulson stated that, with respect to the intention to cause harm: [4]
In his concurring judgment, Lord Neuberger gave guidance as to when a statement which causes distress to a claimant would be considered to be actionable: [5]
Lord Neuberger also noted in obiter that:
As I see it, therefore, there is plainly a powerful case for saying that, in relation to the instant tort, liability for distressing statements, where intent to cause distress is an essential ingredient, it should be enough for the claimant to establish that he suffered significant distress as a result of the defendant's statement. It is not entirely easy to see why, if an intention to cause the claimant significant distress is an ingredient of the tort and is enough to establish the tort in principle, the claimant should have to establish that he suffered something more serious than significant distress before he can recover compensation. (at 119) [3]
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 law, the loss must involve damage to property, or mental or physical injury; pure economic loss is rarely recognised for the award of damages.
Negligence is a failure to exercise appropriate and/or ethical ruled care expected to be exercised amongst specified circumstances. The area of tort law known as negligence involves harm caused by failing to act as a form of carelessness possibly with extenuating circumstances. The core concept of negligence is that people should exercise reasonable care in their actions, by taking account of the potential harm that they might foreseeably cause to other people or property.
A tort, in common law jurisdiction, is a civil wrong that causes a claimant to suffer loss or harm, resulting in legal liability for the person who commits the tortious act. It can include intentional infliction of emotional distress, negligence, financial losses, injuries, invasion of privacy, and many other things. The word 'tort' stems from Old French via the Norman Conquest and Latin via the Roman Empire.
Intentional infliction of emotional distress is a common law tort that allows individuals to recover for severe emotional distress caused by another individual who intentionally or recklessly inflicted emotional distress by behaving in an "extreme and outrageous" way. Some courts and commentators have substituted mental for emotional, but the tort is the same.
This article addresses torts in United States law. As such, it covers primarily common law. Moreover, it provides general rules, as individual states all have separate civil codes. There are three general categories of torts: intentional torts, negligence, and strict liability torts.
The tort of negligent infliction of emotional distress (NIED) is a controversial cause of action, which is available in nearly all U.S. states but is severely constrained and limited in the majority of them. The underlying concept is that one has a legal duty to use reasonable care to avoid causing emotional distress to another individual. If one fails in this duty and unreasonably causes emotional distress to another person, that actor will be liable for monetary damages to the injured individual. The tort is to be contrasted with intentional infliction of emotional distress in that there is no need to prove intent to inflict distress. That is, an accidental infliction, if negligent, is sufficient to support a cause of action.
In common law, assault is the tort of acting intentionally, that is with either general or specific intent, causing the reasonable apprehension of an immediate harmful or offensive contact. Assault requires intent, it is considered an intentional tort, as opposed to a tort of negligence. Actual ability to carry out the apprehended contact is not necessary. 'The conduct forbidden by this tort is an act that threatens violence.'
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 requires a payment of money to make up for damage that is caused. Alongside contracts and unjust enrichment, tort law is usually seen as forming one of the three main pillars of the law of obligations.
Economic torts, which are also called business torts, are torts that provide the common law rules on liability which arise out of business transactions such as interference with economic or business relationships and are likely to involve pure economic loss.
In English law, a nervous shock is a psychiatric / mental illness or injury inflicted upon a person by intentional or negligent actions or omissions of another. Often it is a psychiatric disorder triggered by witnessing an accident, for example an injury caused to one's parents or spouse. Although the term "nervous shock" has been described as "inaccurate" and "misleading", it continues to be applied as a useful abbreviation for a complex concept. The possibility of recovering damages for nervous shock, particularly caused by negligence, is strongly limited in English law.
Alcock v Chief Constable of South Yorkshire Police[1991] UKHL 5, [1992] 1 AC 310 is a leading English tort law case on liability for nervous shock. The case centred upon the liability of the police for the nervous shock suffered in consequence of the events of the Hillsborough disaster.
Wainwright v Home Office[2003] UKHL 53, [2004] 2 AC 406 is an English tort law case concerning the arguments for a tort of privacy, and the action for battery.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and introduction to tort law:
Janvier v Sweeney [1919] 2 KB 316 is a decision by the English Court of Appeal dealing with liability for nervous shock caused by an intentional act.
McLoughlin v O'Brian [1983] 1 AC 410 is an English tort law case, decided by the House of Lords, dealing with the possibility of recovering for psychiatric harm suffered as a result of an accident in which one's family was involved.
Attia v British Gas Plc [1988] QB 304 is an English tort law case, establishing that nervous shock from witnessing the destruction of personal property may be actionable. Prior to this case, a duty of care for an individual's mental health had not been established in situations not involving personal injury or the witnessing of such an event. The Court of Appeal ruled that British Gas were liable for the subsequent shock and depression of Mrs Attia, following the near total destruction of her home and possessions.
Dillon v. Legg, 68 Cal. 2d 728 (1968), was a case decided by the Supreme Court of California that established the tort of negligent infliction of emotional distress. To date, it is the most persuasive decision of the most persuasive state supreme court in the United States during the latter half of the 20th century: Dillon has been favorably cited and followed by at least twenty reported out-of-state appellate decisions, more than any other California appellate decision in the period from 1940 to 2005. It was also favorably cited by the House of Lords in an important case on nervous shock, McLoughlin v O'Brian [1983].
Trespass in English law is an area of tort law broadly divided into three groups: trespass to the person, trespass to goods and trespass to land.
Rhodes v OPO[2015] UKSC 32 was a 2015 judgment by the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom that overturned an injunction preventing the publication of a memoir entitled Instrumental by concert pianist James Rhodes.
The floodgates principle, or the floodgates argument, is a legal principle which is sometimes applied by judges to restrict or limit the right to make claims for damages because of a concern that permitting a claimant to recover in such situations might open the metaphorical "floodgates" to large numbers of claims and lawsuits. The principle is most frequently cited in common law jurisdictions, and in English tort law in particular.