100% contributory negligence

In an article in the Law Society Gazette of 16 May, Simon Allen took as his text Lord Justice Sedley’s view expressed in the case of Anderson v Newham College of Further Education on 25 March, that the phrase ‘100% contributory negligence’ was unhelpful in that it invites the court to treat a statutory qualification of the measure of damages as if it were secondary to liability, which of course it is not. In other words, contributory negligence can reduce the value of a claim but it cannot nullify the legality of the claim. There is therefore an important difference between finding a claimant wholly to blame for the accident and 100% contributorily negligence. Mr Allen considered other judicial uses of the ‘unfortunate’ phrase and concluded we may still see it ‘littering more judgments from the Court of Appeal’.