'The law imposes the duty of care: but the standard of care is a matter of medical judgment'. So says Lord Scarman, outlining the hitherto accepted 'Bolam' standard, in his recent speech in the House of Lords decision of Sidaway v Bethlem Royal Hospital, reflecting earlier judicial dicta suggesting that it is for the medical profession rather than the courts to determine whether or not a medica...

BACKGROUND To present an overview of the clinical negligence claims for ophthalmology in the National Health Service (NHS) in England from 1995 to 2006. To compare ophthalmic subspecialties with respect to claim numbers and payments. METHODS All the claims on the NHS Litigation Authority database for ophthalmology for the period 1995 to 2006 were analysed. Claims were categorised by ophthalmi...

Doctors and patients are not natural enemies. On the contrary, there is commonly a special relationship between them, with vulnerability and trust on one side and caring and professional expertise on the other. A medical dispute can create turmoil of that relationship, particularly if it is conducted in the traditional adversarial procedure. Depending on how it develops, the patient may see the...

We present a new model of negligence and causation and examine the influence of the causation test on the level of care under negligence. In this model, the injurer’s decision to take care reduces the likelihood of an accident only in the event that some nondeterministic intervention occurs. The effects of the causation test depend on the information available to the court, and the manner in wh...

It is a principle recognized by our as well as by other legal systems that ignorance of the law is no excuse for violating it. The rule is also expressed in the form of a legal presumption that everyone knows the law. It is the duty of every man to know that part of it which concerns him. A doctor, in particular, is conclusively presumed to know the law, and is dealt with as if he did know it, ...

A "wrongful life" suit is based on the purported tortious liability of a genetic counsellor towards an infant with hereditary defects, with the latter asserting that he or she would not have been born at all if not for the counsellor's negligence. This negligence allegedly lies in the failure on the part of the defendant adequately to advice the parents or to conduct properly the relevant testi...

Tort scholarship on the law of negligence has long been torn between two competing conceptions. One of these conceptions—the justice conception—holds that negligence law is (and should be) an articulation of our ordinary moral conceptions of agency and responsibility, carelessness and wrongdoing, harm and reparation. The other conception—the economic conception—holds that the law of negligence ...

INTRODUCTION Informed consent [IC] is a recognized socio-legal obligation for the medical profession. The doctrine of IC involves the law, which aims to ensure the lawfulness of health assistance and tends to reflect the concept of autonomy of the person requiring and requesting medical and/or surgical treatment. Recent changes in the health care delivery system and the complex sociological set...

The conventional justification for a statute of limitations on tort suits (or any other legal claim) is that evidence deteriorates over time, thereby increasing the likelihood of legal error. The optimal statute balances this cost of a longer statute length against the dilution in deterrence that results from a shorter length. In this paper I develop a formal model to show that a finite statute...

DURING the early years of the Health Service damages awarded in the courts for negligence increased to an alarming degree. There were at least three factors contributing to this state of affairs-the introduction of free legal aid, certain changes in the law relating to the liabilities of hospitals for the negligence of their staffs, and a perhaps understandable view by the general public that d...