Precarious liability: The High Court in Lepore, Samin and Rich on school responsibility for assaults by teachers (Case notes)
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.
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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 | 0.008 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.026 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.021 | 0.019 |
| 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".