If you have been injured in an accident and you think it was partly or wholly your fault, it might discourage you from making a claim at all. You need to remember that negligence is a legal concept. Injured people who think they are legally to blame for the accident which caused their injuries are often wrong. It is always worth getting legal advice from a specialist personal injury solicitor. Where the injured person is a child, often it can appear that they have been foolhardy in their behaviour. Cases in which children have climbed onto things and fallen or otherwise hurt themselves are nothing new to the law. In a case from the year 2000, the eminent judge, Lord Hoffman, pointed out that the law appreciates that the ingenuity of children “in finding unexpected ways of doing mischief to themselves and others should never be underestimated”. Lisa Wardle made a claim against Scottish Borders Council on behalf of her nine-year-old daughter. This was after her daughter fell Continue Reading
Contributory negligence: what is it?
By definition, contributory negligence can only come into play where your claim is going to be successful. The insurance company dealing with the claim will have accepted 'primary' liability and, in doing so, they accept they have to pay you some compensation. However, they want to restrict how much they have to pay to you and contributory negligence is one way they can try to do that. It means they are saying the accident or the injuries you have suffered were partly due to your own fault. This could be because: you did not take proper care when crossing the road and that was part of the reason for you being knocked down; you tripped over something you ought to have seen, if you had been taking reasonable care; you did not wear a hard hat on a construction site and you were more seriously injured than you would have been otherwise when something fell on your head; or as per the photograph at the top of this article, you were injured due to Continue Reading
Donoghue –v- Stevenson: the world’s modern law of negligence is born in Scotland
If you have an accident claim in Scotland, it is covered by the Law of Delict. In England, it is known as the Law of Torts. The modern law of Delict – covering the duties people owe to others not to cause them injury - can be traced to a particular case, arising from an incident which occurred in Paisley on Sunday, 26 August 1928. The case of Donoghue –v- Stevenson is widely known in legal circles, not just in Scotland and the UK but throughout the world, as the source of the modern law of negligence. A night out in Paisley On the evening in question, May Donoghue, at that time a 30-year-old shop assistant, boarded a tram in Glasgow for the thirty-minute journey to Paisley. At around 8.50pm, she and a female friend took their seats in the Wellmeadow Café in Paisley’s Wellmeadow Place. The café owner, Francis Minchella, took the order and May's friend ordered, and paid for, a pear and ice, and an ice-cream 'float'. Mr Minchella brought the order and poured part of Continue Reading
Child car seats: another reason to make sure it’s the right one
It’s bad enough to be involved in a road traffic accident in which someone is injured ... ... but it is even worse if that person is a young child. As a parent, you will find it difficult to come to terms with an injury to your child even if the accident was not your fault. What follows is the facts of a case from 2012 where a mother – who was driving the vehicle in which her injured child was a passenger – was not responsible for the accident at all but was still found to be partly responsible for her child’s injury. In this accident, there was a collision between two cars near Wrexham, North Wales. The driver of the other car lost control of his vehicle and it crossed to the wrong side of the road. There was nothing Louise Williams could do to avoid the crash. The driver of the other car was killed. Ms Williams’ daughter, Emma, aged three, was seriously injured. In the back of Ms Williams’ car, there were two child seats. One was a child seat fitted with a harness (for Continue Reading