Fear of the “Floodgate of Liability” and Acknowledgment of the Recognisable Psychiatric Damage Into English Law of Tort
Bibliographic record
Abstract
It is well-known that damages to a victim’s psyche can occur due to witnessing or being victim of the traumatic event(s), and this was first recognised in ancient Greece. However, it took centuries for this to be recognised by the common law. It originated within the concept of nervous shock which was first introduced by the Coultas case through negligence in the duty of care. Before the Supreme Court of Victoria (Australia), the jury awarded damages for the shock which, however on a further appeal, the Privy Council held that the damage was too remote. This decision opened a door which was not shut until the present time: the strict relatedness between the physical and psychological injury and the recognition of psychiatric damages for recovery in the absence of physical injury. There is no doubt that the Alcock case has been considered as a “test case” for last two decades which shows all dilemmas and differences in endorsement of psychiatric damages within the English law of tort. This case certainly reflected the scepticism and uncertainty in acknowledging psychological injury and in some court cases, ignorance of medical opinion, or the courts’ concerns about “opening the floodgates” to limitless or unrestricted liability and its ramifications for the insurance industry, or inherent problems of establishing a causative link, or imposing administrative and/or practical difficulties of psychiatric damages to produce a long-term protection to the mental tranquillity.
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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 | 0.011 | 0.023 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.050 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.010 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".