Negligence: Duty, Breach and Damage
Duty of care for physical injury and property damage, the objective standard of care, factual and legal causation, remoteness and intervening acts.
How to study for A-level Law
Learn each rule with its authority, practise identifying issues in factual scenarios, and develop balanced evaluation that reaches a supported legal conclusion.
Core concepts
Concept 1
A negligence claim requires a duty of care, breach, actionable damage, factual causation and legal causation.
Exam cue: Work element by element and stop if a necessary stage fails.
Concept 2
Breach is assessed against the objective standard of the reasonable person while accounting for legally relevant risk factors and defendant characteristics.
Exam cue: At breach, compare the foreseeable risk and precautions rather than using the claimant's injury alone to infer fault.
Concept 3
Damage must be factually caused by the breach and fall within the scope of legally recoverable, sufficiently foreseeable harm.
Exam cue: Keep duty, breach, causation and remoteness analytically separate even when the facts overlap.
Risk pitfalls and guardrails
Applying the Caparo formulation mechanically to every established duty category.
Guardrail: Do not jump from a factual outcome to liability: prove every legal element and keep board-specific coverage separate from the multi-board core.
Judging breach with hindsight because serious damage happened.
Guardrail: Do not jump from a factual outcome to liability: prove every legal element and keep board-specific coverage separate from the multi-board core.
Treating the but-for test as the complete answer to legal causation and remoteness.
Guardrail: Do not jump from a factual outcome to liability: prove every legal element and keep board-specific coverage separate from the multi-board core.
Memory anchors
Duty of care
A legally recognised obligation to take reasonable care toward the claimant.
Breach
Conduct falling below the legally required standard of care.
But-for test
A starting point for asking whether the breach factually caused the damage.
Remoteness
The kind of damage must fall within the legally foreseeable scope of liability.
Intervening act
A later event may break the chain only when the legal causation test is satisfied.
Checkpoint rule
Do the check-up only after you can summarize each concept in one sentence and identify one dangerous pitfall from memory.
Knowledge Check (after reading)
Short check-up to confirm understanding of this module.
Check-up Questions
Current-law scope — A careless driver injures a nearby pedestrian. Must the court apply the full Caparo test to invent a duty?
Current-law scope — What did Robinson v Chief Constable of West Yorkshire clarify about Caparo?
Answer all questions to submit.
Next step personalized recommendations
Continue learning
Move forward only after this module is stable.
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