Introduction
The law of negligence has long struggled to accommodate claims for psychiatric injury in a manner that is both doctrinally coherent and practically just. While physical injury attracts liability through the orthodox application of duty, breach, causation and remoteness, psychiatric injury is subject to a distinct and restrictive framework of control mechanisms that significantly narrows the class of recoverable claimants. This essay argues that the current law does not provide adequate protection for individuals harmed by psychiatric injury, and that the inadequacy is attributable not to any single doctrinal rule but to the cumulative effect of arbitrary proximity requirements, an unsustainable primary/secondary victim distinction, and the judiciary’s persistent reluctance to develop the law in line with modern psychiatric understanding. The control mechanisms established principally in Alcock v Chief Constable of South Yorkshire Police [1992] 1 AC 310 operate less as principled limits on liability and more as devices to contain a judicially perceived floodgates risk, producing outcomes that are difficult to justify on grounds of fairness, logic or consistency. Nevertheless, the opposing argument — that some control on psychiatric injury claims is necessary to prevent indeterminate liability — has genuine force, and any reform must navigate the tension between broader recovery and workable limits. The essay proceeds by examining the doctrinal framework, critiquing the primary/secondary victim distinction and the Alcock control mechanisms in turn, assessing judicial and academic proposals for reform, and concluding that a reconceptualised approach based on reasonable foreseeability and proximity, freed from the rigid Alcock criteria, would better serve both claimants and doctrinal coherence.
The doctrinal framework: a historical architecture of restriction
The modern law of psychiatric injury in negligence rests upon a series of judicial compromises developed over more than a century. Initially, the common law refused recovery for what was then termed “nervous shock” entirely, reflecting scepticism about the reality and verifiability of psychiatric conditions (Mullany and Handford, 1993). The first significant departure came in Dulieu v White & Sons [1901] 2 KB 669, where Kennedy J permitted recovery where the claimant was placed in reasonable fear of immediate physical injury to herself. This “impact” or “fear for oneself” rule was narrow but intellectually defensible: it tied psychiatric harm to a recognisable tort scenario involving direct endangerment.
The law expanded incrementally. In Hambrook v Stokes Brothers [1925] 1 KB 141, the Court of Appeal extended recovery to a mother who suffered shock after witnessing events that she feared had injured her children, even though she was not personally endangered. This case introduced the idea that witnessing harm to another could found liability, but it simultaneously created the conceptual difficulty that has plagued the law ever since: how to limit the class of those who can recover for shock induced by harm to a third party. The House of Lords in Bourhill v Young [1943] AC 92 imposed a proximity requirement based on foreseeability, holding that an unrelated bystander who was not within the range of foreseeable psychiatric harm could not recover. Lord Macmillan’s observation that the law must have regard to the “reasonable fortitude” of a hypothetical person of normal susceptibility introduced a normative filter that continues to shape the law (Bourhill, at 117).
The decisive modern framework was established in McLoughlin v O’Brian [1983] 1 AC 410 and consolidated in Alcock [1992] 1 AC 310. In McLoughlin, the House of Lords permitted a mother to recover for psychiatric injury suffered when she encountered her injured family at hospital approximately two hours after a road accident. The speeches of their Lordships, however, diverged on the proper basis for the decision. Lord Wilberforce articulated specific proximity requirements — closeness of relationship, proximity in time and space to the accident, and the means by which the shock was communicated — as principled controls on liability. Lord Bridge and Lord Scarman preferred a broader approach grounded in reasonable foreseeability, resisting the imposition of arbitrary limits. This disagreement was effectively resolved in favour of Lord Wilberforce’s approach in Alcock, where the House of Lords, considering claims arising from the Hillsborough disaster, imposed three strict control mechanisms for what are now termed secondary victims: (i) a close tie of love and affection with the primary victim; (ii) proximity in time and space to the accident or its immediate aftermath; and (iii) direct perception of the accident or its immediate aftermath through the claimant’s own unaided senses.
The significance of Alcock cannot be overstated. It established a framework that continues to govern the vast majority of secondary victim claims. Yet it did so by choosing restriction over principle, as the following sections demonstrate.
The primary/secondary victim distinction: a conceptual fault line
Central to the current law is the distinction between primary and secondary victims, crystallised by Lord Oliver in Alcock (at 407) and later refined in Page v Smith [1996] AC 155. A primary victim is a person who is directly involved in the accident as a participant and who is within the range of foreseeable physical injury, or who reasonably believes themselves to be so. A secondary victim is a person who witnesses or learns of injury to another. The legal significance is stark: primary victims need only establish that some form of personal injury was foreseeable, without demonstrating that psychiatric injury specifically was foreseeable (Page v Smith, per Lord Lloyd at 190), whereas secondary victims must satisfy the Alcock control mechanisms.
The difficulty with this distinction is that it creates an unprincipled boundary. The classification of a claimant as primary or secondary often depends on factual characterisation rather than meaningful legal principle. In Page v Smith itself, the claimant was involved in a minor road collision that caused no physical injury but triggered a recurrence of chronic fatigue syndrome. The majority held that as a primary victim within the zone of physical danger, it was unnecessary to establish foreseeability of psychiatric injury as a separate type of harm. Lord Lloyd relied on the “egg-shell skull” principle to support this conclusion, reasoning that once any personal injury is foreseeable, the defendant must take the victim as they find them.
This reasoning has been widely criticised. Nolan (2010) has argued persuasively that Page v Smith conflates two distinct questions — whether a duty of care exists and whether the type of damage suffered was foreseeable — and that the thin skull rule, properly understood, operates at the stage of remoteness rather than duty. The practical result of Page v Smith is that a person standing one metre inside the zone of physical danger recovers without needing to prove foreseeability of psychiatric harm, while a person standing one metre outside that zone is treated as a secondary victim and must surmount the Alcock hurdles. As Teff (2009) observed, this “bright line” separating the two categories of victim bears no rational relationship to the severity or foreseeability of the psychiatric injury actually suffered.
The Supreme Court’s decision in Paul v Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust [2024] UKSC 1 recently reaffirmed the Alcock framework and the primary/secondary distinction, declining to extend liability to secondary victims who witnessed the death or deterioration of a loved one as a result of earlier clinical negligence. Lord Burrows, delivering the leading judgment, acknowledged the “anomalies and imperfections” of the existing law but concluded that any fundamental reform should be left to Parliament. This ruling underscores the judiciary’s current unwillingness to develop the law incrementally, a position that may be pragmatically understandable but leaves claimants with arguably meritorious claims without a remedy.
The Alcock control mechanisms: arbitrary barriers to recovery
Close ties of love and affection
The first Alcock requirement demands that the secondary victim demonstrate a close tie of love and affection with the primary victim. Certain relationships — parent and child, spouses — give rise to a rebuttable presumption of such closeness. Other relationships, including siblings, must be proved on the evidence. In Alcock itself, claims by siblings and friends of the Hillsborough victims were rejected because the requisite closeness was not established or, in some instances, was presumed absent.
This requirement is objectionable on at least two grounds. First, it requires bereaved or traumatised individuals to prove, as a matter of evidence, the depth of their emotional attachment to a deceased or injured loved one, which is both intrusive and demeaning. Several of the Alcock claimants were parents who had lost children, yet their claims failed on other proximity grounds; the implication that sibling or friend relationships are inherently insufficient to ground a duty is difficult to justify on any principled basis. Second, the presumptions are under-inclusive. There is no presumption of closeness for cohabitants, close friends or extended family members, notwithstanding that such relationships may, on the facts, involve deeper emotional bonds than some spousal relationships. As Mullany and Handford (1993) have argued, the law’s reliance on categories of relationship rather than the actual intensity of affection produces results that are divorced from the psychiatric reality of how grief and trauma operate.
Proximity in time and space
The second requirement — that the claimant must be proximate in time and space to the accident or its immediate aftermath — was the principal basis for permitting recovery in McLoughlin, where the two-hour interval was held to be within the “immediate aftermath.” In Alcock, Lord Ackner suggested that the aftermath could extend to the hospital to which the injured were taken, but the majority was unwilling to extend it to the mortuary identification of bodies some eight hours after the disaster.
The aftermath doctrine is difficult to apply consistently. In Galli-Atkinson v Seghal [2003] EWCA Civ 697, the Court of Appeal permitted a mother to recover where she attended the scene of a road accident and then saw her daughter’s body at the mortuary, treating the entire sequence as part of the immediate aftermath. However, in Taylor v A Novo (UK) Ltd [2013] EWCA Civ 194, the Court of Appeal held that a daughter who witnessed her mother’s sudden and unexpected death — caused by injuries negligently inflicted three weeks earlier — could not recover because the death was a “separate event” from the original accident. Lord Dyson MR reasoned that extending the aftermath to encompass the consequences of the original negligence, manifesting at a later date, would be an unacceptable expansion of liability.
Taylor v Novo reveals a significant deficiency in the law. The daughter’s psychiatric injury was entirely foreseeable: she witnessed her mother collapse and die as a direct consequence of the defendant’s negligence. The temporal gap between the original tort and the manifestation of its fatal consequences was not a product of the claimant’s remoteness from the events but of the medical trajectory of the primary victim’s injuries. To deny recovery on the basis that the “event” was insufficiently proximate conflates the mechanics of how the primary victim’s injuries developed with the foreseeability and justice of compensating the secondary victim. The Law Commission (1998, Report No 249) had previously criticised the aftermath requirement as producing arbitrary results, and Taylor v Novo exemplifies exactly the kind of injustice the Commission identified.
Perception through one’s own unaided senses
The third Alcock requirement — that the claimant must perceive the accident or its aftermath through their own unaided senses — was decisive in excluding claims by relatives who watched the Hillsborough events unfold on live television. The House of Lords held that simultaneous television coverage, which broadcasting guidelines ensured did not depict the suffering of recognisable individuals, was not equivalent to direct perception.
This restriction is increasingly difficult to sustain in a society in which news and personal communication are transmitted instantaneously through digital media. The Alcock reasoning was shaped by the technology and broadcasting standards of 1991. If a parent today were to receive, via a video call, real-time footage of their child being injured in an accident, the sensory directness of their perception would be functionally identical to witnessing the event in person. Yet the strict application of the “own unaided senses” requirement would arguably exclude such a claim, because the perception is mediated through a screen. This anomaly has been noted by several commentators, including Teff (2009), who argued that the law’s fixation on the medium of perception rather than the quality of the perceptual experience is both outdated and irrational.
The Supreme Court in Paul v Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust [2024] UKSC 1 did not directly address the impact of modern communications technology on this requirement, focusing instead on the temporal and causal dimensions of the secondary victim test in clinical negligence contexts. The unaided senses requirement therefore remains unmodified, despite widespread academic criticism.
The “recognised psychiatric illness” threshold: a necessary but imperfect filter
In addition to the Alcock proximity requirements, all claimants for psychiatric injury — whether primary or secondary victims — must demonstrate a recognised psychiatric illness rather than mere grief, distress or emotional upset. This requirement was established in Hinz v Berry [1970] 2 QB 40 and confirmed in McLoughlin and Alcock. The rationale is that the law of tort compensates injury, not ordinary emotional suffering, and that a diagnostic threshold is necessary to distinguish compensable harm from the inevitable distress that accompanies life’s misfortunes.
This filter is, on balance, defensible. Without some threshold, the scope of potential liability would be genuinely indeterminate. However, the requirement is not without difficulty. The boundary between “mere grief” and a recognised psychiatric illness such as pathological grief disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder or clinical depression is not a bright line but a clinical spectrum. As Bailey and Nolan (2010) have observed, the legal insistence on a categorical distinction between ordinary emotional distress and psychiatric illness does not map neatly onto psychiatric diagnosis, where conditions exist on a continuum of severity. Moreover, the requirement places a significant evidential burden on claimants, who must secure expert psychiatric evidence to demonstrate that their condition crosses the threshold, a process that is both costly and potentially re-traumatising.
Nevertheless, the recognised psychiatric illness requirement serves a legitimate limiting function. The real objection to the current law is not this threshold but the additional, cumulative barriers imposed by the Alcock criteria, which operate to deny recovery even to claimants whose psychiatric illness is medically verified, causally linked to the defendant’s negligence, and reasonably foreseeable.
Policy rationales for restriction: floodgates, fraud and indeterminate liability
The restrictions on psychiatric injury claims are typically justified by reference to three overlapping policy concerns: the risk of a flood of claims, the difficulty of verifying psychiatric harm, and the spectre of indeterminate liability. Each deserves scrutiny.
The floodgates argument posits that relaxing the control mechanisms would expose defendants to an unmanageable volume of claims. This concern was articulated by Lord Steyn in White v Chief Constable of South Yorkshire Police [1999] 2 AC 455 (at 500), where he observed that a more generous approach to secondary victims would produce results that “the ordinary reasonable man” would regard as unacceptable. However, empirical evidence from jurisdictions that have adopted less restrictive approaches, notably Australia following the High Court’s decision in Tame v New South Wales (2002) 211 CLR 317 and subsequent statutory reform, does not bear out the prediction of uncontrollable litigation. As Handford (2006) has documented, the Australian experience suggests that relaxing proximity controls does not generate a flood of claims, partly because the requirement of a medically verified psychiatric illness and ordinary principles of causation and remoteness operate as sufficient filters.
The fraud concern — that psychiatric injury is inherently more susceptible to fabrication than physical injury — reflects attitudes that are increasingly out of step with modern medical understanding. Psychiatric diagnosis has developed considerably since the early “nervous shock” cases. Conditions such as PTSD and clinical depression are recognised in international diagnostic manuals, can be assessed through standardised clinical instruments, and are subject to expert verification. While no diagnostic process is infallible, the same is true of physical injury claims involving subjective symptoms such as chronic pain. To single out psychiatric injury for additional scepticism is difficult to justify on evidential grounds (Law Commission, 1998, para 2.7).
The indeterminate liability concern has more force. Unlike physical injury, which is ordinarily confined to those in the physical path of the defendant’s negligence, psychiatric injury can theoretically be suffered by anyone with a sufficiently close emotional connection to the primary victim, regardless of their physical location. Lord Oliver in Alcock (at 418) expressed this concern clearly, observing that the class of potential claimants for psychiatric harm following a major disaster is potentially very large. Some limiting principle is therefore necessary. The critical question, however, is whether the Alcock criteria represent the most rational and fair means of achieving that limitation, or whether alternative controls — such as a broad test of reasonable foreseeability moderated by ordinary principles of proximity and fairness — could achieve the same objective without the arbitrary exclusions that characterise the current law.
Judicial reluctance and the call for legislative reform
A notable feature of the recent case law is the judiciary’s explicit acknowledgment that the law is unsatisfactory, coupled with a refusal to reform it. In White [1999] 2 AC 455, Lord Hoffmann accepted that the Alcock control mechanisms produced results that could appear unjust, but reasoned that pragmatic considerations and the need for certainty justified maintaining them. In Paul v Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust [2024] UKSC 1, Lord Burrows went further, explicitly identifying anomalies in the secondary victim framework but concluding that “any wholesale reform” was a matter for Parliament rather than the courts.
This judicial deference to Parliament is understandable in some respects. The Alcock criteria create a framework of bright-line rules, and judicial modification of one criterion — for instance, extending the aftermath period — risks destabilising the entire structure without providing a coherent replacement. Moreover, the implications of reform for defendants, insurers and the health service are significant policy questions that arguably require legislative consideration of competing interests. However, judicial restraint carries its own cost. Parliament has shown no appetite for reform since the Law Commission’s 1998 report, which recommended a statutory removal of the proximity in time and space, means of perception, and sudden shock requirements for close relatives (Law Commission, 1998, paras 6.1–6.30). The Commission proposed that a fixed list of close relationships should give rise to an irrebuttable presumption of a close tie of love and affection, and that claimants within those relationships should be required to prove only a recognised psychiatric illness caused by the defendant’s negligence and death, injury or imperilment of the primary victim. These recommendations were never implemented.
The consequence of combined judicial and legislative inaction is a doctrinal stalemate. Claimants with genuine and foreseeable psychiatric injuries continue to be denied recovery because their cases fall on the wrong side of boundaries that neither the courts nor Parliament has been willing to redraw. This represents a failure of the law of negligence to fulfil its compensatory function. As Stapleton (2002) has argued, the control mechanisms in psychiatric injury cases are not merely restrictive; they are “unprincipled” in the specific sense that they do not correspond to any defensible theory of why liability should be limited in the ways they prescribe.
Comparative perspectives: Australia and the case for a less rigid approach
The Australian experience offers a useful, if imperfect, point of comparison. In Tame v New South Wales (2002) 211 CLR 317, the High Court of Australia abandoned the requirement that psychiatric injury be induced by “sudden shock,” and in Gifford v Strang Patrick Stevedoring Pty Ltd (2003) 214 CLR 269, a majority held that employees who learned of a colleague’s death at their workplace could recover without having directly witnessed the fatal event. These decisions reflect a more flexible approach to proximity, one that asks whether the defendant ought reasonably to have foreseen that a person in the claimant’s position might suffer a recognised psychiatric illness, rather than imposing rigid temporal and spatial criteria.
Several Australian states subsequently enacted statutory frameworks for psychiatric injury claims. For example, the New South Wales Civil Liability Act 2002, section 30, imposes a threshold requirement that the claimant be a “close member of the family” of the person killed, injured or endangered, or that the claimant witness the incident at the scene, but does so without the full apparatus of Alcock-style proximity controls. The results have not been the uncontrollable expansion of liability that English floodgates reasoning would predict (Handford, 2006).
Transplanting Australian rules into English law is not straightforward. Institutional, cultural and constitutional differences affect both the content and practical operation of tort rules. Nevertheless, the Australian experience demonstrates that a less rigid approach to psychiatric injury is viable and does not produce the catastrophic consequences that the English courts have feared. It supports the conclusion that the Alcock framework is not the only available architecture for controlling liability and may not be the best one.
Rescuers, involuntary participants and employees: further incoherence
The inadequacy of the current law is further illustrated by the treatment of professional rescuers and employees. In White v Chief Constable of South Yorkshire Police [1999] 2 AC 455, the House of Lords held that police officers who had assisted in the aftermath of the Hillsborough disaster could not recover for psychiatric injury as either primary victims or rescuers. The majority rejected the argument that rescuers constituted a special category entitled to recover outside the Alcock framework, reasoning that to allow police officers to recover when bereaved relatives could not (following Alcock) would be an affront to public perceptions of distributive justice.
Lord Hoffmann’s reasoning in White is revealing. He acknowledged that the police officers’ claims were, on ordinary principles of foreseeability and proximity, well-founded. His reason for denying them was not that the claims lacked merit but that allowing them would expose the incoherence of having denied the Alcock claimants’ claims. In effect, the court denied a meritorious claim to avoid highlighting the injustice of a previous restrictive decision. As Lord Goff observed in his dissent, this reasoning was “an argument of policy that has gone wrong” (at 479). The logic of White is that the Alcock framework, once established, must be maintained even at the cost of denying claims that satisfy every orthodox requirement of the tort of negligence, because to do otherwise would reveal that the framework itself is unjust.
The position of employees who suffer psychiatric injury in the workplace adds a further layer of complexity. In Hatton v Sutherland [2002] EWCA Civ 76 (and the consolidated appeal in Barber v Somerset County Council [2004] 1 WLR 1089), the courts developed principles for occupational stress claims that operate outside the Alcock framework entirely, applying standard principles of employer’s liability and foreseeability. The result is that an employee who develops a psychiatric illness through workplace stress can recover without satisfying any of the Alcock criteria, while a parent who witnesses the traumatic death of their child may be denied recovery because they arrived at the scene minutes too late. This disparity further undermines the claim that the current law achieves a rational distribution of compensatory protection.
The requirement of a sudden shocking event: outdated and medically indefensible
Closely related to the proximity requirements is the implicit requirement, derived from the “nervous shock” terminology, that psychiatric injury be induced by a sudden, traumatic event rather than by a gradual process. In Sion v Hampstead Health Authority [1994] 5 Med LR 170, the Court of Appeal denied recovery to a father who developed a psychiatric illness after watching his son deteriorate and die over a period of days following a negligent failure to diagnose injuries. The court held that the father’s illness was the product of a gradual realisation rather than a sudden assault on the senses, and therefore fell outside the scope of recoverable psychiatric injury.
This requirement is medically indefensible. Psychiatric evidence establishes that sustained exposure to a loved one’s suffering can be at least as psychologically damaging as witnessing a single traumatic event (Teff, 2009). The law’s preference for “sudden shock” over “gradual onset” reflects a nineteenth-century understanding of psychological harm that has no contemporary clinical basis. The Law Commission (1998, para 5.33) recommended the abolition of the sudden shock requirement, a recommendation that has not been implemented but which remains compelling.
The Supreme Court’s decision in Paul [2024] UKSC 1 touched on this issue in the context of clinical negligence, where the typical factual pattern involves a gradual deterioration rather than a sudden accident. Lord Burrows held that a secondary victim who witnesses the consequence of clinical negligence — for instance, the delayed death of a patient whose condition was negligently misdiagnosed — cannot recover because the “horrifying event” requirement is not satisfied. The effect is to exclude virtually all secondary victim claims arising from clinical negligence, a result that Lord Burrows acknowledged was harsh but considered to be a necessary consequence of maintaining the integrity of the existing framework.
Towards a principled reconceptualisation
If the current law is inadequate, what would a more adequate framework look like? Several models have been proposed.
The Law Commission’s 1998 recommendations would retain the general framework but remove the most objectionable restrictions for a defined class of close relatives. Recovery would be available to close relatives who suffered a recognised psychiatric illness caused by the defendant’s negligence resulting in death, serious injury or reasonable fear thereof, without the need to satisfy the proximity in time and space, means of perception or sudden shock requirements. This is a moderate reform that would address the most acute injustices while preserving the recognised psychiatric illness threshold as a necessary filter.
A more radical approach, favoured by some academic commentators, would abandon the primary/secondary victim distinction entirely and apply the ordinary principles of foreseeability, proximity and fairness — the Caparo v Dickman [1990] 2 AC 605 framework — to all psychiatric injury claims. On this view, the control mechanisms in Alcock are unnecessary because the general requirements of the duty of care, the recognised psychiatric illness threshold, and ordinary rules of causation and remoteness provide sufficient protection against indeterminate liability (Stapleton, 2002). The difficulty with this approach is that it provides less certainty than the Alcock criteria and requires courts to make evaluative judgments about the foreseeability and reasonableness of psychiatric harm on a case-by-case basis. Whether this is a deficiency or a virtue depends on one’s view of whether certainty or justice should take priority in this area of law.
A third possibility, which this essay favours, is a modified version of the Law Commission approach that incorporates the insights of the Caparo framework without abandoning structured guidance. Under this model, a fixed list of presumptive close relationships would create a rebuttable presumption of sufficient proximity. Claimants within those relationships would need to prove only (i) a recognised psychiatric illness, (ii) caused by the defendant’s negligence resulting in death, injury or imperilment of the primary victim. Claimants outside the listed relationships would need to prove the closeness of their tie of love and affection as an additional element, but would not be required to demonstrate proximity in time and space, direct perception or sudden shock. This approach preserves a workable structure while removing the most arbitrary barriers. It also reflects the reality that the foreseeability of psychiatric injury depends on the nature of the relationship and the severity of the triggering event, not on the happenstance of whether the claimant was physically present at the scene.
Conclusion
The law of negligence does not provide adequate protection for individuals harmed by psychiatric injury. The inadequacy is structural rather than incidental: it results from the cumulative operation of the primary/secondary victim distinction, the Alcock control mechanisms, the sudden shock requirement, and the unaided senses doctrine, each of which imposes restrictions that are not justified by any coherent principle of tort law. The policy concerns that motivate these restrictions — floodgates, fraud and indeterminate liability — are legitimate in the abstract, but the Alcock framework addresses them through arbitrary proxies rather than through the principled application of foreseeability, proximity and fairness. The result is a body of law that denies recovery to claimants with medically verified, causally connected and foreseeable psychiatric injuries, while permitting recovery in cases that happen to satisfy the control mechanisms regardless of any greater underlying merit. The recognised psychiatric illness threshold serves as a defensible limiting device, and the requirement of a close tie of love and affection, properly applied, is a rational proxy for foreseeability. However, the temporal, spatial and perceptual requirements are not principled limits but historical artefacts that produce outcomes difficult to reconcile with the compensatory objectives of tort law. The strongest reason supporting this conclusion is that no court or commentator has been able to offer a convincing justification for why the manner in which a claimant perceives a traumatic event, or the number of minutes by which they miss witnessing it, should determine whether their genuine psychiatric injury is compensable. Reform, whether through the implementation of the Law Commission’s 1998 proposals or through a broader reconceptualisation of the duty framework, is overdue. Until it occurs, the law of psychiatric injury will remain, as Lord Steyn acknowledged in White (at 500), a part of the law of tort that is “not founded on principle” but on “policy and pragmatism” — a concession that amounts, in substance, to an admission of inadequacy.
References
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