Precarious liability: The High Court in Lepore, Samin and Rich on school responsibility for assaults by teachers (Case notes)
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In these three cases, heard together, the High Court considered the basis, if any, on which liability for (in particular, sexual) assaults by teachers could be attributed to educational authorities. A strong majority held that, where the teacher was an employee, only vicarious liability is available. Clear sceptical signals were sent to plaintiffs seeking to rely on vicarious liability, although several judgments do countenance such liability if the assault is characterisable as ‘excessive’ disciplinary chastisement. The traditional ‘course of employment’ test may, in line with UK and Canadian authority, be shifting to a ‘sufficiently close connection to the employment’ test — though whether this will be any broader in practice remains to be seen. The judgments also reveal scepticism about non-delegable duties (NDDs). Indeed, two judges explicitly hold that NDDs cannot extend to intentional torts, a finding that re-introduces arbitrary distinctions between victims seeking effective redress. Overall, the cases reinforce the conservative trend in the court's tort jurisprudence, yet fail to provide much doctrinal certainty for either child assault victims or the schooling system. This note concludes by suggesting two options for a fairer approach. Either State authorities should move to oust common law and install a tailored, administrative system to deal with claims in this sensitive area; or the common law could creatively borrow an exacting ‘all reasonable steps’ defence from anti-discrimination legislation.
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.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 it