Charles Foster examines material contribution in clinical negligence & personal injury litigation
The law is dangerously Balkanised. Even very close neighbours don’t talk to each other, or talk in languages with impenetrably different dialects. Take personal injury and clinical negligence practitioners, for instance. Many of them grew up together. They learnt the same vocabulary. But then they specialised, and started to forget their roots. To clinical negligence lawyers notions like “material contribution” (prosaic and workaday for personal injury lawyers doing industrial disease work) seem exotic and esoteric—playing, in operating theatres, to rules different from those that apply in factories. Much of the apparent complexity of the law is sociological, not jurisprudential.
Forgetful
Lawyers are also very forgetful. Someone will disinter and re-examine an old principle, shout “Eureka”, and the re-examined principle will have a new life in the law reports for a while, as if it is fresh sprung from the creative brain of a Coke or a Blackstone. Take Bolitho v City and Hackney Health Authority [1998] AC 232, [1997] 4 All ER 771. The word “responsible” had always been a key
