Tort Law 05 - Duty of Care: Who Do You Owe A Duty To?

Duty of Care: Who Do You Owe a Duty To?

In this episode of Law Exchange, we begin looking at the first element of a negligence claim: duty of care.

A duty of care is a legal obligation to take reasonable care to avoid causing foreseeable harm to another person. But the difficult question is not simply whether someone was harmed — it is whether the defendant owed that particular claimant a duty of care in the circumstances.

We explore:

• What a duty of care means in English negligence law.
• Why there is no general duty of care owed to everyone in every situation.
• Examples of established relationships, including drivers and road users, doctors and patients, employers and employees, and manufacturers and consumers.
• Why novel situations can be much more difficult.
• Caparo Industries plc v Dickman and its importance in the development of the law surrounding novel duties.
• Foreseeability — whether the type of harm could reasonably have been anticipated.
• Proximity — the closeness of the relationship between the claimant and defendant.
• Whether it is fair, just and reasonable to impose a duty.
• Robinson v Chief Constable of West Yorkshire Police and the modern qualification that Caparo is not a universal checklist for every negligence claim.

We also look at why the modern approach develops negligence law incrementally, using existing cases and close analogies, particularly when a situation is genuinely novel.

By the end of the episode, you'll have a clearer understanding of why establishing a duty of care is the first major question in a negligence claim — and why the answer is sometimes much less obvious than it seems.

Law Exchange — making legal concepts easy to understand.