Negligence and the Duty of Care

The modern tort of negligence rests on a duty of care: a legal obligation not to act, or fail to act, in a way that a reasonably foreseeable person might be injured by. Its foundational modern statement is Lord Atkin's neighbour principle in Donoghue v Stevenson (1932), which held that a person owes a duty of care to anyone they ought reasonably to have in contemplation as likely to be affected by their acts or omissions, replacing a patchwork of narrower, situation-specific duties that earlier English law had recognized. Once a duty of care is established, a claimant in negligence must further show that the duty was breached by falling below the standard of a reasonable person, and that the breach caused damage that was not too remote a consequence of the breach. The doctrine has been received, refined and in places narrowed across nearly every common law jurisdiction since 1932, generally regarded as the single most influential private law holding to come out of the House of Lords in the twentieth century.