Negligence is a failure to exercise appropriate care expected to be exercised in similar circumstances.
In Western jurisprudence, concurrence is the apparent need to prove the simultaneous occurrence of both actus reus and mens rea, to constitute a crime; except in crimes of strict liability. In theory, if the actus reus does not hold concurrence in point of time with the mens rea then no crime has been committed.
Assault occasioning grievous bodily harm is a term used in English criminal law to describe the severest forms of battery. It refers to two offences that are created by sections 18 and 20 of the Offences against the Person Act 1861. The distinction between these two sections is the requirement of specific intent for section 18; the offence under section 18 is variously referred to as "wounding with intent" or "causing grievous bodily harm with intent", whereas the offence under section 20 is variously referred to as "unlawful wounding", "malicious wounding" or "inflicting grievous bodily harm".
Bolam v Friern Hospital Management Committee [1957] 1 WLR 582 is an English tort law case that lays down the typical rule for assessing the appropriate standard of reasonable care in negligence cases involving skilled professionals such as doctors. This rule is known as the Bolam test, and states that if a doctor reaches the standard of a responsible body of medical opinion, they are not negligent. Bolam was rejected in the 2015 Supreme Court decision of Montgomery v Lanarkshire Health Board in matters of informed consent.
Assault occasioning actual bodily harm is a statutory offence of aggravated assault in England and Wales, Northern Ireland, the Australian Capital Territory, New South Wales, Hong Kong and the Solomon Islands. It has been abolished in the Republic of Ireland and in South Australia, but replaced with a similar offence.
R v Brown[1993] UKHL 19, [1994] 1 AC 212 is a House of Lords judgment which re-affirmed the conviction of five men for their involvement in consensual unusually severe sadomasochistic sexual acts over a 10-year period. They were convicted of a count of unlawful and malicious wounding and a count of assault occasioning actual bodily harm. The key issue facing the Court was whether consent was a valid defence to assault in these circumstances, to which the Court answered in the negative. The acts involved included the nailing of a part of the body to a board, but not so as to necessitate, strictly, medical treatment.
Causation is the "causal relationship between the defendant's conduct and end result". In other words, causation provides a means of connecting conduct with a resulting effect, typically an injury. In criminal law, it is defined as the actus reus from which the specific injury or other effect arose and is combined with mens rea to comprise the elements of guilt. Causation only applies where a result has been achieved and therefore is immaterial with regard to inchoate offenses.
Reibl v Hughes [1980] 2 S.C.R. 880 is a leading decision of the Supreme Court of Canada on negligence, medical malpractice, informed consent, the duty to warn, and causation.
In law, an omission is a failure to act, which generally attracts different legal consequences from positive conduct. In the criminal law, an omission will constitute an actus reus and give rise to liability only when the law imposes a duty to act and the defendant is in breach of that duty. In tort law, similarly, liability will be imposed for an omission only exceptionally, when it can be established that the defendant was under a duty to act or duty of care.
Murder is an offence under the common law legal system of England and Wales. It is considered the most serious form of homicide, in which one person kills another with the intention to unlawfully cause either death or serious injury. The element of intentionality was originally termed malice aforethought, although it required neither malice nor premeditation. Baker, chapter 14 states that many killings done with a high degree of subjective recklessness were treated as murder from the 12th century right through until the 1974 decision in DPP v Hyam.
Causation in English law concerns the legal tests of remoteness, causation and foreseeability in the tort of negligence. It is also relevant for English criminal law and English contract law.
R v Blaue (1975) 61 Cr App R 271 is an English criminal law appeal in which the Court of Appeal decided, being a court of binding precedent thus established, that the refusal of a Jehovah's Witness to accept a blood transfusion after being stabbed did not constitute an intervening act for the purposes of legal causation. This upheld the decision of Mocatta J. in the court below, Teesside Crown Court.
R v Dear [1996] is an English criminal law case, dealing with homicide and causation. The court ruled, slightly extending R v Holland, that even if a victim aggravates his wounds sufficiently to cause otherwise avoidable death, the chain of causation is not broken.
R v Cheshire [1991] 1 WLR 844 is an English criminal law case establishing the role of the jury in finding liability for death, where subsequent medical negligence occurs following the original injury. The Court of Appeal found that the jury did not have to weigh up different causes of death, and need only be satisfied that the defendant's actions made a "significant contribution" to the victim's death.
Bailey v Ministry of Defence [2008] EWCA Civ 883 is an English tort law case. It concerns the problematic question of factual causation, and the interplay of the "but for" test and its relaxation through a "material contribution" test.
Gregg v Scott [2005] UKHL 2 is an English tort law case, on the issue of loss of a chance, in causation. It affirms the principle of Hotson v East Berkshire Area Health Authority, on a narrow margin of 3 to 2. Lord Nicholls' dissent is of particular note, in arguing that loss of a chance should be actionable.
R v Jordan (1956) 40 Cr App R 152 was an English criminal law case that has been distinguished by two later key cases of equal precedent rank for its ruling that some situations of medical negligence following a wounding are those of breaking the chain of causation, capable of absolving a person who has inflicted bodily harm of guilt for an offence of the severity resulting from a consequent decline in bodily condition, in particular, homicide. The facts were ones whereby a wound was should to be almost certain, with no treatment, to heal itself. The medical attempt to facilitate recovery from the wound resulted in a non-prosecutable death as it was shown to have been negligent and principally an antibiotic error though far from unknown and well-intentioned. The appropriate charge(s) would be ones relating to wounding or disorder of the defendant, rather than homicide which could not have been said to have been caused by the defendant in any meaningful way.
South African criminal law is the body of national law relating to crime in South Africa. In the definition of Van der Walt et al., a crime is "conduct which common or statute law prohibits and expressly or impliedly subjects to punishment remissible by the state alone and which the offender cannot avoid by his own act once he has been convicted." Crime involves the infliction of harm against society. The function or object of criminal law is to provide a social mechanism with which to coerce members of society to abstain from conduct that is harmful to the interests of society.
In S v Tembani, an important case in South African criminal law, especially in respect of the issue of legal causation, it seemed to the Witwatersrand Local Division, following the approach of English law, to be "of overriding importance that the original wound inflicted by the accused was an operating and substantial cause of the death of the deceased." If, at the time of death, the original wound is still an operating and substantial cause of death, then the death is a result of the wound, even if another cause was also operating. The court thus appeared to endorse the "proximate-cause" criterion, also known as direct-consequences or individualisation theory, of legal causation. The court added that death is not the result of the original wound if it is just the setting in which another cause operates. Only if the second cause is so overwhelming as to make the original wound merely part of the history may it be said that death does not flow from the wound.
The Charlie Gard case was a best interests case in 2017 involving Charles Matthew William "Charlie" Gard, an infant boy from London, born with mitochondrial DNA depletion syndrome (MDDS), a rare genetic disorder that causes progressive brain damage and muscle failure. MDDS has no treatment and usually causes death in infancy. The case became controversial because the medical team and parents disagreed about whether experimental treatment was in the best interests of the child.
