Professional Negligence in English Law

Professional Negligence In English Law

In the English law of tort, professional negligence is a subset of the general rules on negligence to cover the situation in which the defendant has represented him or herself as having more than average skills and abilities. The usual rules rely on establishing that a duty of care is owed by the defendant to the claimant, and that the defendant is in breach of that duty. The standard test of breach is whether the defendant has matched the abilities of a reasonable person. But, by virtue of the services they offer and supply, professional people hold themselves out as having more than average abilities. This specialised set of rules determines the standards against which to measure the legal quality of the services actually delivered by those who claim to be among the best in their fields of expertise.

Read more about Professional Negligence In English Law:  The Relationship Between Contract and Tort, Discussion, Medical Negligence, See Also

Famous quotes containing the words professional, negligence, english and/or law:

    Many young girls are ... becoming trained nurses, whose gentle ministrations in the sick-room, skilled touch, patient watchfulness and unwearied vigils, are as great factors in the care of the sick, as are the professional physicians.
    Lydia Hoyt Farmer (1842–1903)

    The negligence of Nature wide and wild,
    Where, undisguised by mimic art, she spreads
    Unbounded beauty to the roving eye.
    James Thomson (1700–1748)

    Here tulips bloom as they are told;
    Unkempt about those hedges blows
    An English unofficial rose;
    Rupert Brooke (1887–1915)

    There is all the difference in the world between the criminal’s avoiding the public eye and the civil disobedient’s taking the law into his own hands in open defiance. This distinction between an open violation of the law, performed in public, and a clandestine one is so glaringly obvious that it can be neglected only by prejudice or ill will.
    Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)