Contributory negligence on appeal

Contributory negligence is a private law doctrine of considerable practical importance, and trial court decisions applying the doctrine are frequently the subject of appeals. In this article, we report the key findings of an empirical study of the operation of the contributory negligence doctrine in the Court of Appeal. A fuller report of the results of our study can be found in James Goudkamp and Donal Nolan, “Contributory Negligence in the Court of Appeal: An Empirical Study” (2017) 37 Legal Studies (forthcoming). This study builds upon an earlier exploration of the handling of the contributory negligence doctrine at first instance: James Goudkamp and Donal Nolan, “Contributory Negligence in the Twenty-First Century: An Empirical Study of First Instance Decisions” (2016) 79 Modern Law Review 575.

The basics

We looked at all Court of Appeal decisions on contributory negligence handed down between 2000 and 2015 that were accessible online. Of the 112 claims in our dataset, 42% concerned appeals from the High Court