Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article analyses the evolution of the reconstructed doctrine of vicarious liability for intentional torts, as tested in the decision of the English Court of Appeal in Maga (by his Litigation Friend, the Official Solicitor) v. Trustees of the Birmingham Archdiocese of the Roman Catholic Church [2010] EWCA Civ 256. This case directly tested the tensile strength of the connection between child abuse and the abuser's employment, because the victim of the pedophile priest in question was not a Roman Catholic. It traces the transformation of the 'enterprise risk' rationale into a test for vicarious liability in the jurisprudence of the Supreme Court of Canada, and contrasts this with the ambiguous version of the 'sufficient connection' test preferred by the House of Lords in Lister v. Hesley Hall. In Maga the Court of Appeal adopted the Canadian 'enterprise risk' test for vicarious liability, it is argued rightly. However the primary liability analysis, whilst accepting a duty of care on the part of the church to protect the child from abuse, defined the duty unacceptably narrowly as a duty on the part of the supervising priest, having received a complaint from the family of another victim, merely to keep a lookout for and protect young boys from the pedophile priest, because it was at the time (1992) for the priest to fear damage to the person accused and to the institution of the Church. It is submitted that given the widespread knowledge on the part of church authorities at that time of the risk of child abuse by priests, and the concerted cover-up in dioceses around the world, the duty should have been to investigate the initial complaint, and to take immediate action if warranted. Moreover, it is argued that accepting the denial of an accused priest without further investigation of an alleged criminal offence, in order to protect the priest's and institution's image rather than the child, cannot be considered by negligence law to be reasonable conduct, regardless of the era.
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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 | 0.009 | 0.029 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.028 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.013 | 0.002 |
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".