Bibliographic record
Abstract
. Throughout the common-law world, there is no liability for negligence unless the defendant breached a duty of care owed to the plaintiff. But when is such a duty owed? In the foundational judgment of English negligence law in 1932, Donoghue v. Stevenson , Lord Atkin asserted that “there must be, and is, a general conception of relations giving rise to a duty of care.” Lord Atkin thereby gave expression to the view that the law cannot treat the collection of duties as a chaotic miscellany of disparate norms. Rather, the systematic nature of legal norms requires both that all duties of care be thematically unified through the same underlying principle and that each particular duty be internally coherent. More recently, however, courts seem to have given up on the attempt to formulate or appeal to a general conception of duty and have returned to the multiplicity of particular duties that Lord Atkin deplored. This has caused a “disintegration of duty.” The general conception of the duty of care – its theoretical basis, its structural constituents, its more recent disintegration back into particular duties, and the need to recapture what a general conception of duty implies – is the subject of the present chapter. It first shows through an analysis of the landmark cases of the Twentieth Century how duty fits with other negligence concepts (failure to exercise reasonable care, factual causation, and proximate cause) to connect the defendant's act to the plaintiff's injury in a normatively coherent way. It then sets out the internal structure of the duty of care, that is, what its constituents must be if it is to reflect a coherent conception of wrongdoing.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.043 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".