Intentional interference

All legal systems offer extensive protection to life, health, and physical integrity, to which they attach great importance. For example, they regard offenses leading to personal injury, such as assault (an act producing in the plaintiff/victim a reasonable expectation of immediate unlawful force) and battery (the intentional application of unlawful force), as both torts and crimes capable of attracting serious criminal sanctions. The same is true of the complete restriction of the plaintiff’s freedom of movement without lawful excuse, which can be actionable both as a tort and as a crime. Complicated rules—usually contained in specific criminal statutes—may, however, remove the unlawful element in some cases (e.g., lawful arrest by a police officer or, in limited instances, by a private citizen). Consent by the victim or plaintiff may also make an otherwise unlawful interference lawful. Consent to the infliction of grievous bodily harm, however, is generally regarded as unacceptable, and consent in the context of negligent medical malpractice suits tends to raise complicated issues to which there exist various legal responses. Most of the problems in this context relate to the question of how much information a medical practitioner is required to give to a patient before the latter’s consent can be regarded as informed (informed consent being crucial because it eliminates the element of unlawfulness associated with harm resulting from the medical procedure).

The importance attached by the modern law to human life and limb is also obvious from the appearance (mainly in the mid-20th century) of a number of statutory schemes intended to afford redress to victims of crimes of violence (e.g., the English Criminal Injuries Compensation scheme). This is particularly useful in cases where the assailant is not known or not considered worth suing; it has also often been of great use to policemen injured in the line of duty during civil unrest. Compensation in such cases comes through funds specifically allotted by Parliament, and the amounts awarded are usually calculated in approximate accordance with normal tort rules. Similar schemes can be found in most advanced legal systems, though their role is subsidiary to the normal tort rules, and their award levels tend to be limited.

Most tort rules covering intentionally inflicted personal injury, though important, are handled by the criminal courts (sometimes with the plaintiff also appearing as a civil party and claiming damages, as in France). Tort law’s main contribution is accordingly found in the numerically more significant negligent interferences with life and physical integrity, to which the rest of this article is limited.

Negligence

The conceptual approaches of the common-law, French, and German-inspired systems are quite different. In practice, however, where personal injury is concerned, there must be conduct that (1) is intentional or, more frequently, careless, (2) is not justifiable, and (3) leads to (“causes” in a legal sense) harm. Regarding intention or carelessness, the common-law systems have for various reasons been slower than the civil-law systems in imposing liability for inaction. During the second half of the 20th century, a trend in the United States aimed to relax this individualistic rule, with courts and statutes increasingly imposing (on paper at least) the possibility of liability, especially in the context of failing to render assistance to victims of traffic accidents. Such statutes typically imposed a duty to come to the aid of another person. More frequently, however, bystanders were encouraged to act as good Samaritans by ensuring that the standard of care they had to display was lowered, thereby shielding them against subsequent actions by ungrateful victims. French law by contrast has since 1945 recognized a general duty to aid a person in physical danger if that can be done without risk to the rescuer. Similar provisions can be found in other systems as well (such as the Dutch, the Greek, and the German legal systems), though the slim case law that they seem to have generated would suggest that the value of such rules is mainly educational. The same appears to be true of the American statutes that attempted to broaden potential liability.

The conduct must be culpable—i.e., intentional or, more typically, careless. Modern legal systems resort to objective criteria to determine the requisite standard of care: the defendant must behave as the bonus pater familias, or, as common lawyers put it, the reasonable man. Both definitions are essentially the anthropomorphic conception of justice enabling courts to adjust the requisite standard according to factors such as the magnitude of the injury, the cost of avoiding it, and the likelihood of its being realized. Nowadays courts tend to treat as carelessness errors that even a reasonable man would make. Here the legal and ordinary meanings of negligence diverge, and this transformation commonly occurs where insurance is obligatory and the courts know that by characterizing the defendant’s conduct as negligent they are actually compensating the victim without ruining the defendant.

Finally, the conduct must have caused the plaintiff’s hurt. The problem of causation is widely discussed, especially in medical malpractice cases, though the solutions tend to be similar. The approach in Germany (and, at times, in the United States) is more theoretical than in France and England. Both in Germany and in France the test of causation is the “adequate cause,” and, though differently understood by these systems, this tends to produce results analogous to those reached by the common-law test of “foreseeability.”

Gray areas

Despite every system’s concern for human life and health, interference with these interests is not automatically compensated. In some cases the manner of infliction of the harm determines whether compensation is decreed, as with physical injury resulting from some failure to act, already mentioned above. In others the nature and timing of the interference influence the extent of tort compensation. Compensation for emotional harm or psychological injury is affected by the former consideration, injury to a fetus by the second.

Legal systems approach these problems differently and can range from the apparently generous to the obviously restrictive. The concepts they use to achieve the desired aim of controlled compensation also differ. The German-inspired systems have long behaved as if the solution depended on a proper application of causative theories. Common law has also tended to disguise the real policy issues, judges often giving the impression that the answer depends on foreseeability or the presence or absence of a “duty of care”; indeed, during the 20th century the latter concept became the prime controlling device. The often bewildering variety of concepts used to keep liability within reasonable bounds, however, should not conceal the fact that the policy reasons behind such moves are common to all. Thus, it is widely recognized that psychological trauma can lead to a multiplicity of actions—some no doubt based on faked claims. Equally important, however, must be the realization that claims of pure emotional harm—unaccompanied by physical or psychological manifestations—have a low priority in a world of limited resources, a world unable to cope adequately or even at all with many kinds of serious accidents, illness, or disease.

Although the present trend both in the United States and in England is to be skeptical of the validity of these administrative objections, most systems seem to rely on an impressive variety of rules of thumb in an attempt to limit the number of successful plaintiffs. One such rule depends on the distinction between psychiatric injury or shock accompanied by physical or psychological manifestations and mere anguish, pain, or grief—the latter remaining uncompensated. Although widely accepted by both common-law and civil-law systems, this rule has been challenged in some U.S. jurisdictions. Another device is to limit compensation to a person within the danger zone; another and more liberal approach allows even those not within the danger zone to recover damages so long as their shock results from seeing or hearing the accident with their own unaided senses. But even here exceptions are being made in the case of “meritorious” plaintiffs. Thus, in England a woman who suffered shock through seeing her injured husband and children in the hospital soon after an accident (at which she was not present) was allowed to recover damages (McLoughlin v. O’Brian [1983]).

But in the United States an almost exact factual equivalent led to the opposite conclusion in Thing v. La Chusa (1989), in which the Supreme Court of California denied the plaintiff an award because she had not witnessed the injury her son received from an automobile accident caused by the defendant. When decisions of this nature cannot be reconciled through legal means, they are best viewed through the sociopolitical context of the time and place as well as the temperament of the deciding judge. Incidentally, this contextual approach to tort law provided a new perspective by which to study the subject of tort reconciliation. Many lawyers, however, see worrying signs of uncertainty, if not a comprehensive threat to tort law, in such a context-sensitive approach.

Problems also arise when injury is inflicted to a fetus or when harm is suffered by a female prior to conception. Initially both common-law and civil-law systems were reluctant to sanction damages for prenatal injuries, because of evidentiary reasons—the difficulty of establishing a causal link between accident and fetal injury—and conceptual difficulties connected with the foreseeability of the victim-fetus. The precise legal status of the fetus has also troubled experts in criminal and property law. Damages were first awarded to a fetus in the United States in 1946, in Australia in 1972, in Canada in 1973, and in England in 1976 by the Congenital Disabilities (Civil Liability) Act. Differences remain as to details (e.g., is it enough that the fetus was viable at the time of the injury, or must it also be born alive?). More importantly, the difficulties attendant to this topic have increased, as the paradigmatic form of inflicting these injuries—physical impact on the mother—has now been replaced by the more invidious interference of toxic substances affecting the human body over a long period of time. This represents a growing area of tort law that is best handled through interdisciplinary approaches, which take into account the complex corpus of regulatory law that deals with environmental damage.

A subsequent and even more troublesome development has involved the so-called wrongful conception, wrongful birth, and wrongful life actions, appearing first in the United States (from about the early 1970s) and later in Europe. The harmful event is typically negligence on the part of a doctor who fails to carry out effectively a sterilization operation, with the result that an “unwanted” child is born (whether impaired in health or otherwise). These are the wrongful conception cases. Alternatively, a medical practitioner’s negligence may consist of failure to diagnose an illness in the mother—e.g., rubella in the early stages of pregnancy—with the result that the opportunity for an abortion is lost and a child is born (usually) with impaired health. The child’s action (for wrongful life) consists mainly of a claim that, but for the doctor’s negligence, it would not exist at all; the parents’ claim (for wrongful birth) is for pain and suffering and, most importantly, the extra costs of rearing the “unwanted” child. The first claim has been rejected by courts of all systems on grounds ranging from the most technical (How does one assess damages?) to the most philosophical (Should the court be allowed to decide issues of the value and quality of life?). In reality, however, these and other arguments are excuses for the courts’ refusal to come to grips with a serious problem on which there is no general consensus. Although courts have been slow to recognize such claims to children, they are nonetheless increasingly willing to grant them special damages connected with their handicap, and judges also are more generously inclined when compensating parents who bring wrongful birth actions.