The Negligence Liability of Public Authorities. By Cherie Booth QC and Dan Squires
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2230.2007.00641.x |
| Date | 01 March 2007 |
| Author | John Murphy |
| Published date | 01 March 2007 |
REVIEWS
Cherie Booth QC and Dan Squires,The Negligence Liabi lity of Public
Auth ori tie s,Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 2006, lviiiþ944pp, hb d145 .0 0 .
Many people^but especially law students^who confront the law of tort for the
¢rst time fail to see the connections between the various categories under which
the duty of care principles in the law of negligence are usually explicated. Not
infrequently, theywill refer to‘the tort of economic loss’ orthe ‘tort of psychiatric
harm’ as though they were somehow separate torts. But in truth, only one topic
generallydealt with under the bannerof duty of care canplausibly be seen in this
way, and this is the negligence liabilityof public authorities. The reasonwhy pub-
lic authority negligence can be seen as discrete, of course, is attributable to both
the fact that the relevant law is centred upon the uneasy intersection of public and
private law and the fact that the issues that arise in such cases are, at once, matters
of both lawand politics in a way that cannot be true of cases where both litigants
are private bodies. In other words, in the context of public authority negligence
cases, the courts mustgrapple with a range of considerations that would simply be
incongruous in the context of any other kind of negligence action. The most
notable of these considerations, is the question of justiciability that has troubled
the English courts repeatedly (andparticularly the House of Lords) since thedays
of DorsetYacht. Indeed, the point has been reached where one might be forgiven
for declaring the law on public authority negligence to have become so complex
and inconsistent that we have reached the stage where any attempt to rationalize
(or at least explain) it is almost bound to fail. However, seemingly against all the
odds, Cherie Booth QC and Dan Squires have succeeded in providing a clear
pathway through this legal jungle in their monumental tome,TheNegligenceLia-
bility of PublicAuthorities.
One of the chief virtues of this book is its readability. And this feature is no
added luxury. The area of law with which they concern themselves is one of the
most intractable within the whole of the law of tort. As such, it counts for an
awful lot that the book is written in a style that makes even problematic issues
seem somehow simpler to grasp. Much of this beguiling simplicity is attributable
to the eminently clear prose; but it is also a matter ofcareful structuring.Thus, at
the very start of the book^even before there is any substantive text^a simple £ow-
chart is provided which diagrammatically represents the various stages in a negli-
gence action against a public authority. Of course, there will nothing new in this
for the practitioners at whom the book is primarily aimed. But what this simple
chart does dois to get ‘the big picture’ clearlyin our minds before weeven start to
tackle the tangled mess intowhich the law has woven itself in this ¢eld. To rein-
force this‘big picture’, the ¢rst chapter is also devoted to contextualising the law.
It sets out straightforwardly and methodically just why public authority negli-
gence liability is so problematic. Hard-edged law and abstract legal principles
r2007 The Authors.Journal Compilation r2007 The Modern Law Review Limited.
Published by BlackwellPublishing, 9600 Garsington Road,Oxford OX4 2DQ,UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA
(2007) 70(2) MLR339^348
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