Tort Law: Text and Materials

Citation

Lunney, M., Nolan, D., & Oliphant, K. (2017). Tort Law: Text and Materials (6th ed.). Oxford University Press.

Chapter Summary

The sixth edition has eighteen chapters and runs to roughly a thousand pages. It is a "text and materials" book: each section opens with the authors' overview of the law and then reproduces extracts from judgments, government reports and academic writing, with commentary and suggestions for further reading. The chapters follow the usual order of an English tort course, from intentional torts through negligence to nuisance, defamation, privacy and damages.

Chapter 1: General Introduction

Opens the book with an overview of tort law and its purposes, before the individual torts are taken up. It is the chapter to read first for the aims of tort and the reasoning behind liability.

Chapter 2: Intentional Interference with the Person

Covers the torts of deliberate harm to the person: assault, battery and false imprisonment, together with the liability for intentionally causing harm associated with Wilkinson v Downton, and the defences to them.

Chapters 3–6: The Structure of Negligence

Chapter 3 introduces negligence and its elements: duty of care, breach, causation and damage. Chapter 4 deals with breach of duty and the standard of care, looking at the likelihood and gravity of harm, the cost of precautions and the value of the defendant's activity. Chapter 5 treats causation and scope of liability: the "but for" test, the problems it meets (including cases of multiple causes), remoteness and intervening acts. Chapter 6 covers the defences to negligence: consent (volenti non fit injuria), contributory negligence, exclusion of liability and illegality.

Chapters 7–10: The Duty of Care in Particular Contexts

The duty of care is not treated in one block. Instead four chapters take its problem areas in turn: psychiatric illness (Chapter 7), where the law distinguishes primary from secondary victims; economic loss (Chapter 8), with its general exclusionary rule and the Hedley Byrne exception for negligent misstatements and services; omissions and the acts of third parties (Chapter 9); and the liability of public bodies (Chapter 10), where the policy reasons for limiting liability are set against statutory responsibilities.

Chapters 11–12: Special Liability Regimes; Nuisance and Rylands v Fletcher

Chapter 11 gathers liability regimes with their own rules: employers' liability, occupiers' liability, product liability and breach of statutory duty. Chapter 12 covers public and private nuisance and the rule in Rylands v Fletcher, which concerns escapes of dangerous things from land.

Chapters 13–14: Defamation; Privacy

Defamation (Chapter 13) examines what makes a statement defamatory, publication, the defences, remedies and the balance between reputation and free speech. Privacy (Chapter 14) looks at the relation of privacy to the law of confidence and to human rights, and at the misuse of private information.

Chapters 15–17: Vicarious Liability; Damages for Personal Injury; Death and Damages

Chapter 15 explains when employers and others answer for the torts of those they employ. Chapter 16 sets out how damages for personal injury are assessed. Chapter 17 deals with the effect of death on claims, both the survival of the deceased's own claim and the claims of dependants.

Chapter 18: How Tort Works

The final chapter steps back from the individual torts to consider the tort system as a whole. As its title suggests, it is a closing chapter and is most useful once the doctrine has been learned.

Key Concepts

Chapters 1–2: Introduction; Intentional Torts

• Aims of tort law: the purposes, such as compensation and deterrence, against which the later rules can be evaluated.
• Intentional harm to the person: assault, battery and false imprisonment, which do not depend on proof of negligence.

Chapters 3–6: Negligence

• Duty of care: the requirement that the defendant owed the claimant a legal obligation to take care, associated with Donoghue v Stevenson and Caparo Industries v Dickman.
• Breach and the standard of care: the question of what a reasonable person in the defendant's position would have done.
• Causation and remoteness: the "but for" test and the limits on how far liability extends for foreseeable and unforeseeable consequences.
• Contributory negligence: the claimant's own fault reduces the damages awarded.

Chapters 7–10: Duty of Care in Context

• Primary and secondary victims: the distinction that structures liability for psychiatric illness.
• Pure economic loss: financial loss with no physical damage, generally excluded except where responsibility has been assumed, as in Hedley Byrne.
• Liability of public bodies: how a duty of care interacts with statutory powers and duties.

Chapters 11–17: Other Torts and Remedies

• Occupiers' and product liability: statutory regimes for harm caused by premises and defective goods.
• Nuisance and Rylands v Fletcher: interference with the use of land.
• Vicarious liability: liability for another person's tort because of the relationship between them.
• Heads of damage in personal injury: the categories into which compensation is divided and the way each is assessed.

Critical Analysis

Strengths

• Primary materials, not only commentary. Because the book reproduces extracts from cases, reports and scholarship, a student meets the actual reasoning of the courts and sees how academic criticism responds to it. This suits courses that assess argument and critical evaluation.
• A clear overview before every extract. The publisher stresses that each section begins with a statement of the law, so the extracts do not have to be decoded unaided.
• Structure by problem area. The duty of care is split into separate chapters (psychiatric illness, economic loss, omissions, public bodies), so each difficult area gets its own sustained treatment, and a closing chapter looks at how tort works as a system.
• Pointers to further reading are woven through the text, which helps with essay research.

Limitations

• Heavy for a first encounter. At around a thousand pages, with long extracts, the book is more demanding than a conventional textbook and is easier to use alongside one than as a first introduction.
• Edition-specific. The sixth edition dates from 2017, and a later edition has since appeared. Case law on duty of care, vicarious liability and defamation has continued to develop, so check any point of current law against an up-to-date source.
• English law only. The book is organised around the law of England and Wales; readers on courses in other jurisdictions will need local material.

Where It Fits in the Course

Among the tort-law books on the site, this is the one that combines textbook and casebook. Horsey and Rackley's Tort Law is a course textbook built around leading cases and policy, and Markesinis and Deakin's Tort Law, McBride's Tort Law and Street on Torts are textbook treatments of the full syllabus; any of them is a more compact first read. Lunney, Nolan and Oliphant is the natural next book when a lecturer expects students to read the judgments themselves, or when essay questions demand engagement with the case law and the academic debate.

The remaining books are more specialised. Gatley on Libel and Slander is a detailed treatment of defamation alone, so it goes beyond Chapter 13 of this book. Atiyah's Accidents, Compensation and the Law is a contextual study of how the law sits beside insurance and social security, which suits readers interested in the wider system that Chapter 18 considers. Stevens's Torts and Rights is a theoretical monograph arguing that torts protect rights. It is useful once the doctrine is familiar, and it can be set beside the discussion of aims in Chapter 1.

How to Use This Book

The book suits second-stage readers: students who have a lecture course or a textbook running in parallel and want the primary sources behind it. It assumes no prior law beyond an introduction to the legal system, but it rewards careful reading of extracts.

A practical plan is to follow the order of the syllabus. Read Chapters 1–2 early, then work through Chapters 3–10 as the core of the negligence course, since that block carries most of the examinable doctrine. Chapters 11–17 can be read as each topic is taught. Chapter 18 is best left to the end of the course, when it can serve as revision of the larger themes.

For each section, read the authors' overview first, then the extracts, and finally write a short note on the issue each extract raises and whether the later extracts agree with it. Use the suggested further readings for essay topics, and check statutes and recent decisions in a current source before relying on the law as stated.