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.
In the common law of torts, res ipsa loquitur is a doctrine that infers negligence from the very nature of an accident or injury in the absence of direct evidence on how any defendant behaved. Although modern formulations differ by jurisdiction, common law originally stated that the accident must satisfy the necessary elements of negligence: duty, breach of duty, causation, and injury. In res ipsa loquitur, the elements of duty of care, breach, and causation are inferred from an injury that does not ordinarily occur without negligence.
In criminal law, criminal negligence is a surrogate mens rea required to constitute a conventional as opposed to strict liability offense. It is not, strictly speaking, a mens rea because it refers to an objective standard of behaviour expected of the defendant and does not refer to their mental state.
Medical malpractice is professional negligence by act or omission by a health care provider in which the treatment provided falls below the accepted standard of practice in the medical community and causes injury or death to the patient, with most cases involving medical error. Claims of medical malpractice, when pursued in US courts, are processed as civil torts. Sometimes an act of medical malpractice will also constitute a criminal act, as in the case of the death of Michael Jackson.
In tort law, the standard of care is the only degree of prudence and caution required of an individual who is under a duty of care.
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 : the Bolam test. Where the defendant has represented him- or herself as having more than average skills and abilities, that is as a professional "as all doctors do", this test expects standards which must be in accordance with a responsible body of opinion, even if others differ in opinion. In other words, the Bolam test states that "If a doctor reaches the standard of a responsible body of medical opinion, he is not negligent".
Volenti non fit iniuria is a common law doctrine which states that if someone willingly places themselves in a position where harm might result, knowing that some degree of harm might result, they are not able to bring a claim against the other party in tort or delict. Volenti applies only to the risk which a reasonable person would consider them as having assumed by their actions; thus a boxer consents to being hit, and to the injuries that might be expected from being hit, but does not consent to his opponent striking him with an iron bar, or punching him outside the usual terms of boxing. Volenti is also known as a "voluntary assumption of risk."
Schloendorff v. Society of New York Hospital, 105 N.E. 92, was a decision issued by the New York Court of Appeals in 1914 which established principles of respondeat superior in United States law.
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.
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.
Defensive medicine, also called defensive medical decision making, refers to the practice of recommending a diagnostic test or medical treatment that is not necessarily the best option for the patient, but an option that mainly serves the function to protect the physician against the patient as potential plaintiff. Defensive medicine is a reaction to the rising costs of malpractice insurance premiums and patients’ biases on suing for missed or delayed diagnosis or treatment but not for being overdiagnosed. U.S. physicians are at highest risk of being sued, and overtreatment is common. The number of lawsuits against physicians in the USA has increased within the last decades and has had a substantial impact on the behavior of physicians and medical practice. Physicians order tests and avoid treating high-risk patients to reduce their exposure to lawsuits, or are forced to discontinue practicing because of overly high insurance premiums. This behavior has become known as defensive medicine, "a deviation from sound medical practice that is indicated primarily by a threat of liability".
Scott v. Bradford, 606 P.2d 554 (1979) is a Supreme Court of Oklahoma case.
Chester v Afshar [2004] UKHL 41 is an important English tort law case regarding causation in a medical negligence context. The House of Lords decided that a doctor's failure to fully inform a patient of all surgery risks vitiates the need to show that harm would have been caused by the failure to inform.
F v R, is a tort law case. It is a seminal case on what information medical professionals have a duty to inform patients of at common law.
Wrongful birth is a legal cause of action in some common law countries in which the parents of a congenitally diseased child claim that their doctor failed to properly warn of their risk of conceiving or giving birth to a child with serious genetic or congenital abnormalities. Thus, the plaintiffs claim, the defendant prevented them from making a truly informed decision as to whether or not to have the child. Wrongful birth is a type of medical malpractice tort. It is distinguished from wrongful life, in which the child sues the doctor.
The South African law of delict engages primarily with "the circumstances in which one person can claim compensation from another for harm that has been suffered." JC Van der Walt and Rob Midgley define a delict "in general terms [...] as a civil wrong," and more narrowly as "wrongful and blameworthy conduct which causes harm to a person." Importantly, however, the civil wrong must be an actionable one, resulting in liability on the part of the wrongdoer or tortfeasor.
Canterbury v. Spence was a landmark federal case decided by the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit that significantly reshaped malpractice law in the United States. It established the idea of "informed consent" to medical procedures.
Montgomery v Lanarkshire Health Board [2015] UKSC 11 is a Scottish delict, medical negligence and English tort law case on doctors and pharmacists that outlines the rule on the disclosure of risks to satisfy the criteria of an informed consent. The Supreme Court departed and overruled the earlier House of Lords case in Sidaway v Board of Governors of the Bethlem Royal Hospital, in reconsidering the duty of care of a doctor towards a patient on medical treatment. The case changed the Bolam test to a greater test in medical negligence by introducing the general duty to attempt the disclosure of risks.
