Contributory Negligence

Abstract

Abstract It used to be the rule at common law that if your own carelessness had contributed to your injury, your claim in negligence was completely barred, even if the defendant’s fault and contribution were much greater than your own. This rule was very harsh, since most accidents, especially those at work, would be avoided if the victim had been more careful, and even if the accident itself cannot be prevented, the harm resulting from it can be reduced by sensible precautions, such as wearing a seat-belt or a hard hat. In 1945 this vicious old rule was replaced by statute. Nowadays damages for an injury are to be reduced to the extent that the claimant’s fault contributed to it. ‘Contributory negligence’ is thus only a partial defence—it affects the claimant’s quantum of recovery rather than the defendant’s liability—but it is raised very frequently, and has a great impact on the operation of the law. Note that while in the United States ‘contributory negligence’ refers to the old rule, now generally replaced there by ‘comparative negligence’, in England ‘contributory negligence’ denotes only the negligence of the claimant himself, not that of a third party whose negligence equally contributes to the occurrence of the harm.