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Judicial approaches to contested causation: Fairchild v. Glenhaven Funeral Services in context - PDF
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1 Law, Probability and Risk (2002) 1, Judicial approaches to contested causation: Fairchild v. Glenhaven Funeral Services in context CHRIS MILLER Reader in Environmental Management, School of Environment & Life Sciences, University of Salford, Salford, M6 6PU, UK [Received on 26 May 2002; revision received on 9 September 2002; accepted on 16 September 2002] The decision of the House of Lords in Fairchild v. Glenhaven Funeral Services raises important questions about the compensation of employees for occupational injury. In Fairchild, the principal issue was whether an employee could recover where he could prove negligently inflicted injury, but, having worked for more than one employer, not the identity of the person who caused the injury. This article considers the issue in the wider context of judicial responses to uncertainty in personal injury litigation. It suggests that Fairchild raises issues which are little different from those in other personal injury cases where judges have been prepared to take a pragmatic approach to causation, in order to allow a deserving plaintiff to recover damages. Keywords: Personal injury; causation; mesothelioma; fact-finding; loss of chance. 1. Introduction Arthur Fairchild had been exposed to asbestos during periods of employment with various firms. But neither of the two employers sued was found, on the balance of probabilities, to have been responsible for the exposure which initiated his fatal mesothelioma; thus his widow could not recover. 1 Five months later, the High Court granted damages to Edwin Matthews 2 whose mesothelioma had arisen in circumstances very similar to those of Mr Fairchild. After hearing conjoined appeals in both these (and two similar) cases, 3 the Court of Appeal came down firmly in favour of the first instance reasoning in Fairchild. A little over ayear earlier, the Court of Appeal 4 had upheld a ruling in the Divisional Court that a victim of asbestosis could recover against one employer even though others had also negligently exposed him to asbestos. Thus in the six months before the House of Lords 5 overturned the Court of Appeal ruling in Fairchild, itseemed that the judicial pragmatism which, for more than a quarter of a century, has enabled recovery for asbestosis, silicosis 1 Fairchild v. Glenhaven Funeral Services Ltd QBD Matthews v. Associated Portland Cement and British Uralite plc QBD Judith Fairchild v. Glenhaven Funeral Services Ltd, Waddingtons plc and Leeds City Council [2001] EWCA Civ Holtby v. Brigham & Cowan (Hull) Ltd [2000] 3 All ER Fairchild v. Glenhaven Funeral Services Ltd, Fox v. Spousal (Midlands) Ltd, Matthews v. Associated Portland Cement Manufacturers (1978) Ltd and others [2002] UKHL 22. c Oxford University Press2 120 C. MILLER and other pneumoconioses, could not extend to the UK victims of a mesothelioma epidemic 6 which is predicted to kill some men in Western Europe over the next years. If the history of tort can be characterized as a constant struggle between reformers and conservatives, then the Court of Appeal ruling in Fairchild represented a significant (if short-lived) victory for the latter. At first glance, this case is simply about a claimant s need to identify, among a number of defendants, the one whose negligence led to his injury. But had the Fairchild ruling not been reversed, it would have had repercussions extending beyond the particular problems faced by victims of asbestos-related cancer and would have influenced any personal injury case in which causation was contested. It served as a reminder that McGhee, 7 an undoubted victory for the reformers, involved a thinly disguised sleight of hand by five law lords anxious to prevent a victim of a common occupational disease being denied compensation because of uncertainty in the medical evidence. That celebrated piece of judicial prestidigitation was relied on by the claimant in Page v. Smith, 8 which, by granting relief for psychiatric harm arising in a car accident in which no physical injury was caused, was itself something of a milestone. 9 And McGhee was cited in the recent British Coal Respiratory Disease Litigation 10 a case in which cigarette smoking was advanced by the defendants as a more likely cause of the claimants respiratory dysfunction than inhaled coal dust. In McGhee, the Law Lords were at pains to point out that theirs was a common sense 11 understanding of causation. A common sense understanding may be all a judge can employ in cases in which science has yet to offer a complete and unchallenged account of the aetiology of a particular condition: the civil courts cannot commission laboratory experiments or epidemiological studies, nor can they suspend a case until someone else does. The various approaches adopted by judges when faced with uncertainty, especially in scientific evidence in negligence cases, have attracted the attention of academic analysts in many countries. The latest ruling of the House of Lords can only add to that academic interest. In view of the breadth and depth of the related literature, 12 and the additions that Fairchild will undoubtedly generate, the aim of any single contribution should be clearly stated. Following an overview of contested causation in personal injury law, this paper considers why the identity of the author of a negligent act might be seen as a special form of uncertainty which cannot be accommodated within the pragmatism of existing common law. Having set the context, the House of Lords ruling is then examined, not in the depth to which pure tort lawyers will feel it merits, but in an attempt to isolate questions 6 J. Peto, A. Decarli, C. La Vecchia, F. Levi and E. Negri The European mesothelioma epidemic British Journal of Cancer (1999) 79 (3/4) McGhee v. National Coal Board [1972] 3 All ER Page v. Smith [1996] 1 AC Page v. Smith was central to the Court of Appeal ruling that police officers, who suffered psychiatric shock as a result of their experiences of the Hillsborough tragedy, were primary victims of their Chief Constable s negligence a decision later reversed by the Lords under White v Chief Constable of South Yorkshire Police [1999] 2 AC QBD, 23 January Above n7at The author s understanding of the gist of negligence has been assisted by Jane Stapleton s paper of that title in (1988) LQR 212 and 389 and by Peter Cane s recent book The Anatomy of Tort Law (2001, Hart Publishing).3 JUDICIAL APPROACHES TO CONTESTED CAUSATION 121 N X (f 1 f 2 f 3.) H N X (f 1 f 2 f 3.) H N X (f 1 f 2 f 3.) H N X (f 1 f 2 f 3.) H path (A) path (B) path (C) path (D) N represents a negligent act (or omission) and N represents its absence; similarly X represents another, non-negligent act and X its absence; and f i represents a sub-set of background conditions, acts or events which, although not usually labelled causes in either lay or a legal usage, must also be present (whether before or after the occurrence of N and X) in order to make each set of events sufficient to give rise to actual harm H. represents the logical AND operator. FIG.1. Logical structure of contested causation with two causal candidates. which remain unanswered following this latest attempt to square the circle of justice, legal principle and scientific uncertainty. 2. Contested causation with one defendant 2.1 Personal injury: the claimant s twofold task Physicists tend to prefer a general solution to an n-body problem to one which describes, even if in a more elegant manner, the behaviour of only two bodies. Lawyers are denied a comparable choice: the majority of personal injury cases are ones in which res ipsa loquitur applies an employee s fingers are amputated in a machine which was not fitted with the appropriate guard and any litigation will revolve around the amount of damages to be paid. In those cases where causation is contested, the dispute most often concerns the relative contributions of tortious and non-tortious acts. Cases involving multiple alleged tortfeasors therefore comprise a sub-category of a minority which is too small to have acquired its own jurisprudence. When faced with the type of problem posed by Fairchild, judges may seek guidance in rules and principles which have evolved from cases which were evidentially (if not legally) simpler. And if judges declare their approach to be based upon common sense, they must rely upon notions of cause and effect from which all trace of paradox, no matter how appealing it might be to philosophers, has been eradicated. This section of the paper attempts to outline the two-body problem of contested causation in personal injury; the following sections then consider the extent to which Fairchild and similar cases require a separate model. Although we tend to use the word cause to refer to a single event (the arsonist s lighting of a match), the event so labelled is usually one of a sufficient set of necessary elements (the availability of combustible material; oxygen in the atmosphere; docility of the security guard; failure of the sprinkler system; late arrival of the fire brigade) in a causal path leading to the top event (the burning of a factory). In the simplest system, one with two potential causes (see Fig. 1) we can list four logically distinct causal paths (sufficient sets), any one of which is capable of resulting in harm. Positivism holds that only one of these can be the true representation of what actually happened.4 122 C. MILLER The burden of proof lies with the claimant: 13 it falls to him to persuade the court on the balance of probabilities that a causal path in which N is a necessary element offers the more probable account of the events which led to harm H. For the purposes of this paper, the claimant s task must be seen as involving two 14 distinct requirements: he must first construct a path (either A or B) and then argue that this offers a more likely explanation than either of the paths (labelled C and D in Fig. 1) in which the negligent act is not present. The traditional but for and the more recent NESS (necessary element of a sufficient set) tests 15 both attempt to describe the ways in which the courts attribute a causal connection between empirical events (breach N and harm H). It is heuristically useful to think of this construction of a causal mechanism as the first of two elements of the claimant s task. The second is essentially one of advocacy persuading the judge (or jury) to accept that this causal scenario, linking loss to negligence, is the most likely representation of a past reality. Reliance upon the balance of probabilities standard is essentially a policy decision which has withstood the test of time. 16 It is often the case in personal injury litigation that probabilistic or statistical arguments are employed in the first part of the claimant s task and they may influence the judge s deliberations in the second. But the judge is not bound by them: he must still consider their significance, the quality of the procedures by which they were collected and analysed. The inductive character of the reasoning in the second part cannot be escaped. 17 The but for approach to causation is sometimes described as counterfactual in that it constructs a hypothetical chain of events which, in the absence of (but for) the negligent act, would have avoided the occurrence of harm. The extent to which a claimant relies upon hypothetical arguments is, in practice, a matter of choice. 18 He might choose to focus on one of the non-negligent paths (whether C or D is again a matter of choice) and then attempt to persuade the judge (or jury) that harm H would not have arisen had the past followed that path. But the alternative strategy establishing that a path, in which N is present, offers the more credible account of the past has an obvious practical 19 advantage. We can never 13 Although Lord Wilberforce suggested, in McGhee (above n 7 at 1012), that the onus should pass to a defendant whose negligence was not disputed. Recently the suggestion appeared attractive to some members of the Australian High Court in Chappel v. Hart (1998) 156 ALR 517 in spite of its firm rejection by the House in Wilsher (below n 22). But this unequivocal statement of current English law notwithstanding, the burden effectively shifts to a defendant if and when he appeals. And of course, he has every incentive to assume it at first instance once the claimant s arguments begin to appear too attractive to the judge. 14 The claimant must also of course establish that the negligent act breached a duty of care owed to him by the defendant and that the resulting harm was reasonably foreseeable. Breach and foreseeability were not in dispute in the great majority of the cases considered in this paper. 15 For adiscussion of the relative merits of the but for and NESS tests, see Tony Honoré Necessary and Sufficient Conditions in Tort Law in D. G. Owen (ed.) Philosophical Foundations of Tort Law (Oxford, 1995). See also M. Stauch Causation, Risk, and Loss of Chance in Medical Negligence (1997) 17 OJLS For anaccount of its policy justification, see D. Kaye The Limits of the Preponderance of the Evidence Standard: Justifiably Naked Statistical Evidence and Multiple Causation [1982] American Bar Foundation Research Journal The judge must make what A. J. Ayer describes as a judgement of credibility, which he distinguishes from the a priori statements of probability (there is a 50% probability that a true coin will land heads ) and from statistical judgements such as the probability that a man will die of lung cancer is increased if he is a heavy smoker, see Probability and Evidence (1972, Macmillan) p P. Cane argues that in a tort action the causal issue always involves a hypothetical (or counterfactual ) question, The Anatomy of Tort Law (2001, Hart Publishing) at It also avoids a theoretical problem, discussed by Honoré (above n 15 at 372), posed by the but for test.5 JUDICIAL APPROACHES TO CONTESTED CAUSATION 123 have video recordings or eye witness accounts to support our speculation on what might have been. The law believes the past to be fixed and the future to be fluid. 20 Even in a world free of deceit and perjury, our knowledge of the past would still be uncertain. But the forensic process believes that contemporary records and our memory (and that of others) offer us an account of the actual past, which is of a different order from our imagining either of the future 21 or of hypothetical pasts. The twofold nature of the claimant s task tends to be obscured in evidentially simple cases: the absence of credible alternative causal paths (capable, in our earlier example, of amputating fingers) and the certain belief in the tortious one (the unguarded machinery) are easily conflated. Of the English cases considered in this paper, Wilsher 22 (described below) perhaps offered, until Fairchild, the clearest articulation of the law on contested causation. But it is also necessary to consider other key cases in which claimants have recovered without having fully satisfied both parts of their task as set out above. Bonnington 23 (1956) Mr Wardlaw contracted silicosis after inhaling dust to which he was constantly exposed in the course of his employment in the foundry at Bonnington (near Edinburgh). Dust arose from two sources: one (N, swing grinders) tortious; the other (X, pneumatic hammers) not. But it was argued that since he could not prove that his condition was caused by the tortious dust (which was physically and chemically indistinguishable from that arising from the other source) then, on the balance of probabilities, he should not recover. Lord Reid (as he did 13 years later when hearing McGhee) rejected this restrictive line of argument (pursued earlier in the minority speech of the Lord President in the Court of Session):... but I cannot agree that the question is which was the more probable source of [Wardlaw s] disease, the dust from the pneumatic hammers or the dust from the swing grinders. It appears to me that the source of his disease wasthe dust from both sources, and the real question is whether the dust from the swing grinders materially contributed to the disease. 24 The logical converse of a negligent act is not inaction but a non-negligent act. But, from the infinite set of lawful acts which the defendant might have committed, which do we select to speculate upon? Whichever we choose, we must assume that the other necessary elements (the background conditions labelled f i in Fig. 1) remain the same. This assumption of stability in the real world would be vigorously challenged by those chaos theorists who construct systems in which the flutter of a butterfly s wing can result in a cyclone, see D. Hamer, Chance would be a fine thing : proof of causation and quantum in an unpredictable world (1999) 23 Melbourne ULR 557 at D. Hamer, ibid. 21 The courts recognition of the asymmetry of time can be seen in the approach towards provisional damages for future harm which is expected to result from past injury. A worker exposed to ionizing radiation incurred leukaemia for which his employers admitted liability; damages included a provision for the 20 per cent chance of a recurrence (which would be fatal) of the cancer, Molinari v. Ministry of Defence [1994] PIQR Q33. Applied to harm in a past which we believe we can know, the p > 50% test results in all or nothing damages; but the orthodox test is not applied to subsequent harm arising in a future about which we can only make statements of likelihood. 22 Wilsher v. Essex Area Health Authority [1988] 1 AC Bonnington Castings Ltd v. Wardlaw [1956] 1 All ER ibid at 618.6 124 C. MILLER Silicosis is a pneumoconiosis for which it has long been accepted 25 that the dose/effect relationship is deterministic rather than probabilistic: once exposure exceeds a threshold value, further exposure increases (proportionately) the severity of the condition. In contrast, a probabilistic dose/effect relationship means that there is no threshold and it is the probability of incurring the condition, not the severity, which increases with exposure. A deterministic or cumulative aetiology (dust N dust X) clearly fits into causal path (A); the widespread acceptance of the cumulative (and detrimental) effect of dust exposure perhaps meant that their Lordships were not obliged to engage in the elegant circumlocutions which a close reading of our next case, McGhee, reveals. McGhee (1972) For James McGhee, dust was an ever present, but non-tortious, condition (X) of his employment in a brickworks. The negligent event (N) was infact an omission, namely failure to ensure that showers were available to wash off the dust at the end of the working shift. Would Mr McGhee s dermatitis (H) have arisen even if he had been able to shower at work (N X) or was the consequent delay in removing the offending dust until he reached home another necessary element (N X) in producing this skin disorder? According to the dermatologist called by the plaintiff, the contemporary state of medical knowledge was such that he could not say that if the appellant had been able to wash off the dust by showers he would not have contracted the disease. 26 It follows from that counterfactual statement that he was unable to say that the probability he attached to causal path (A) exceeded 50%. He was, however, prepared to say that failure to provide showers materially increased the chance, or risk, that dermatitis might set in. 27 This was an important concession, for it was seized on by all five judges who were clearly anxious to do justice to the victim of a negligent omission who, for want of medical evidence to the effect that prompt showering was more likely than not to have prevented dermatitis, would be denied compensation. To avoid what was seen as an unsatisfactory outcome, Lord Reid devised a formula which the other Law Lords accepted (albeit with a slightly difference emphasis shown by each judge):... it has often been said that the legal concept of causation is not based on logic or philosophy. It is based on the practical way in which the ordinary man s mind works in the every-day affairs of life. From a broad and practical viewpoint I can see no substantial difference between saying that what the respondents did materially increased the risk of injury to the appellant and saying that what the respondents did made a material contribution to his injury. 28 The House awarded full damages to Mr McGhee even though there had been no medical 25 Historians might debate the wider socio-economic reasons for the delay in implementing effective control measures over dust in mines and factories but, by 1956, there was no doubt as to why they were necessary. Measures to control dust had been present in statute for many years by then: for example, s. 47, Factories Act Above n7at ibid. 28 ibid at 1011.7 JUDICIAL APPROACHES TO CONTESTED CAUSATION 125 evidence before them to establish that the probability of path (A) exceeded 50%. In (provisional 29 ) summary, McGhee requires a conflation of a material contribution to... injury and a materially increased... risk as well as an assumption that the risk factors operate together (N X) and elevate the likelihood of path (A) above any of its three rivals. McGhee is important because it placed the concept of risk at the centre of the jurisprudence of causation in personal injury. Lord Reid admitted his reluctance to be bound by logic or philosophy ; 30 the House has subsequently shown its reluctance to be unduly bound by McGhee. It has, on more than one occasion, applied the orthodox balance of probabilities to nullify the liability of a defendant despite his having negligently increased a claimant s risk of injury. The point is best illustrated by Hotson. Hotson 31 (1985) Stephen Hotson, when aged 13, fell from a tree and injured his hip. It was only on his second visit to hospital, and after five days of increasing pain, that the nature and extent of the hip injuries were discovered. The issue was whether the resulting disability could have been avoided had the hip (rather than the knee) been examined on the first visit to hospital immediately after the fall. The defendant s expert witness was certain that the negligent examination had made no difference to the final condition: too many blood vessels in the neck of the femur had already been damaged. The claimant s witness took the view that there was a somewhat less than 50% chance that lasting damage to the hip was inevitable regardless of prompt diagnosis. It was this contrasting evidence which forced the judge at first instance to conclude though not without some difficulty that the claimant had suffered a 25% loss of chance 32 of recovery. Applying McGhee, MrJustice Simon Brown awarded damages calculated at 25% of the full award for such a level of disability. The Court of Appeal upheld this decision but it was soon to be overturned by the House of Lords. Wilsher and Hotson in the House of Lords (1987). Some nine months later, the Court of Appeal upheld an appeal by an alleged victim of a similar instance of medical negligence. But on this occasion, there were some four nontortious causal paths any one of which could have led to the plaintiff s blindness and the negligent failure (to prevent excessive oxygen supply) represented a fifth. After giving a 29 Discussion of the gist of McGhee is resumed in Section 4 below. 30 Above n7at Hotson v. Fitzgerald [1985] 3 All ER The 25% figure attached to Hotson s loss of chance (of recovery) did not come from some research study. In fact, it derived from the despairing pragmatism of Simon Brown, J who, faced with the defendant s medical witness who was convinced (degree of belief = 100%) that prompt diagnosis made no difference at all and the claimant s witness who would not advance beyond 50%, resorted to the very dubious expedient of taking the average value of 75% (i.e. 1 2 ( ), leaving a degree of belief of only 25% that prompt diagnosis would have prevented the onset of necrosis. The expert evidence was empirically based the claimant s witness referred to an article which described nine cases of fracture of the epiphysis, of which only four resulted in the avascular necrosis which Hotson suffered. The evidence was more than anecdotal and clearly important but it did not have the compelling weight that would be attached to a major research study which found, let us say, that, of 4000 juveniles falling out of trees, 1000 recovered given prompt diagnosis and treatment.8 126 C. MILLER detailed exposition of McGhee, Mustill LJ concluded after much hesitation... that the shape 33 taken by the enhancement of the risk ought not to be of crucial significance and dismissed the appeal. But this line of reasoning was rejected by the House of Lords when considering first Hotson 34 and then Wilsher. 35 In Hotson, Lord MacKay argued that it was not correct to say that the claimant had a chance (p = 25%) of avoiding necrosis on arriving at hospital: Hotson s fate had been determined by that time and the evidence suggested that, on the balance of probabilities, too many blood vessels had already been damaged for necrosis to be avoided. 36 In Wilsher, there were no numerical estimates of risk; and when it was decided that none of the five candidate causal paths had emerged as more probable than any other, the p > 50% criterion had not been satisfied by the negligent path and therefore the claimant could not recover. Central to the Lords decision in Wilsher was Lord Bridge s identification of the minority speech 37 of Browne-Wilkinson, V-C in the Court of Appeal as having established precisely why McGhee did not apply (because belief in the tortious path (A) failed the p > 50% test). McGhee therefore had to be distinguished but it was not overturned. 2.2 Loss of chance A close examination of the Lords ruling in Hotson might suggest that James McGhee was fortunate that the dermatologist was unable to give a quantitative estimate of the increased risk of incurring dermatitis. For if an estimate less than 0.5 had been quoted in court, a more explicit discussion of the balance of probabilities criterion would have been necessary. 38 If the estimate had been greater than 0.5, then McGhee would have been just another occupational injury case which raised no new principle in the law of negligence. Moreover, it is not difficult to see why, in Wilsher, Mustill LJ was inclined to interpret McGhee as a case in the loss of chance tradition: the absence of the shower denied McGhee a chance of avoiding dermatitis. A recent case, with evidential circumstances very similar to Hotson, would appear to confirm that the Courts will not compensate loss of chance (of avoiding injury) in medical negligence. 39 The retention of loss of chance in professional negligence is therefore curious. 40 In Allied Maples, 41 the Court of Appeal held that the claimants needed to establish that it was more likely than not that, if properly advised by their (defendant) solicitors, they would have adopted a different approach when conducting a series of property transactions. They did not have to prove that an alternative and less costly outcome was then certain or even probable (> 50%); they needed only to establish that there existed a substantial chance 33 The significance of the shape of risk enhancement is discussed further in Section 4.1; Wilsher v. Essex Area Health Authority [1987] QB 730 at Hotson v. East Berkshire Area Health Authority [1987] AC Above n Above n 34 at 785; this point is discussed in Section Above n 33 at The speech of Lord Salmon gets closest to the nub of the problem: if given proper shower facilities, the risk of dermatitis is 52%, then no liability attaches to their absence, but it does if that risk is estimated at 48%:... such results would not make sense; nor would they, in my view, accord with the common law, aboven7at Tahir v. Harringey Health Authority [1996] Med L Rev See J. Payne Chance of recovery in civil action claims (1997) 18 Comp Law Allied Maples Group Ltd v. Simmons & Simmons (a firm) [1995] 4 All ER 907.9 JUDICIAL APPROACHES TO CONTESTED CAUSATION 127 that this outcome would have occurred. Once the judge had a degree of belief (p > 50%) that it was meaningful to speak of this substantial chance having been lost, then the claimant could recover. There was no suggestion that this substantial chance itself had to exceed 50%. The logical structure of Allied Maples becomes equivalent to that of McGhee, Hotson and Wilsher if the lost chance is taken to be as real as the actual economic loss: in other words, if it is treated as a form of harm in itself (H in Fig. 1) arising via a causal path in which the defendant s (professional) negligence is a necessary element. Once the judge is prepared to accept the claimant s account of the creation of the lost chance, recovery becomes possible. The claimant does not have to establish, on the balance of probabilities, that the counterfactual outcome (no loss) would have ensued but for the negligent advice. Several analysts have explored the notion of the negligent imposition of risk of physical injury, regardless of whether actual injury ensues, being actionable in itself. 42 In practice, reckless behaviour (especially by car drivers) and risk creation per se continue to incur criminal liability alone. But in McGhee, Lord Salmon argued that the common law did not recognize a distinction between a material increase of risk (of contracting a disease) and material contribution (to causing a disease). Aided by the testimony of an expert witness, their Lordships degree of belief in the existence of a material (but unquantified) risk exceeded 50%, recovery for the plaintiff then followed. The Court of Appeal first in Hotson and later (by a majority) in Wilsher believed it was the intention of the House of Lords to allow recovery for increased risks of less than 50%. 43 Why then did their Lordships reaffirmation of the p > 50% all or nothing rule (for the degree of belief in the tortious causal path) in these two medical negligence cases not have repercussions for subsequent actions in professional negligence? In the report of Allied Maples, Hotson and Wilsher(but not McGhee) are listed under cases cited, but the ratio relies entirely upon an application of earlier precedents from the loss of chance tradition, including Chaplin 44 a contract case from the Edwardian era involving neither professional nor medical negligence, only the pure (or a priori) 45 chance of a lottery. The chance that Allied Maples lost was in fact the opportunity to persuade the vendor company to exclude certain liabilities from a contract: the claimant could only speculate on whether the vendor (a third party) would have done so. The ruling in Allied Maples could be interpreted as sparing the claimant the need to prepare a counterfactual argument: once the empirical reality of a past chance is established (p > 50%), he is not required to go further and attach probability estimates to what might have been. Fairchild and related appeals were argued in terms of risk imposed rather than chance lost. They are cases in personal injury; the key evidence on causation was given by epidemiologists, who constantly referred to asbestos exposure as adding to the risk of mesothelioma. The remaining sections of this paper attempt to set these appeals within the wider context of contested causation, described above, and then to explain why they 42 See J. Stapleton above n 12 at 234; G.O. Robinson Risk, Causation and Harm in G. Frey and C. W. Morris (eds) Liability and Responsibility (1991). 43 An extract from the speech of Lord Kilbrandon in McGhee the appellant has, after all, only to satisfy the court of a probability, not to demonstrate an irrefragable chain of causation, which in a case of dermatitis, in the present state of medical knowledge, he could probably never do (above n 7 at 1016) reveals that judge s sympathy with a loss of chance interpretation. 44 Chaplin v. Hicks [1911] 2 KB See n 17 above.10 128 C. MILLER necessitated a reconsideration of the original aims of the House when it chose to award James McGhee his damages. 3. Contested causation in multiple defendant cases 3.1 Mesothelioma Mesothelioma is the term applied to cancer of the lining of the lung (pleura) or of the abdomen (peritoneum). Around 1500 cases occur annually in the United Kingdom and in only 50 or 60 is there no known history of exposure to asbestos dust. The aetiology remains far from clear: It has been suggested that the initiating cause may be direct or indirect, or a combination of the two. The cause is direct where damage is caused to the DNA of the affected cell by an asbestos fibre or fibres grating on it, or where there has been some interference with that portion of the DNA which controls the proliferation of the cell. There are two possible indirect mechanisms. The asbestos fibres may become engulfed by scavenger cells in the lungs called macrophages, which release chemical mediators which may bring about DNA damage or interfere with recovery mechanisms. Alternatively, these chemical mediators may stimulate the proliferation of cells, increasing the chances of a malignant cell surviving and proliferating. It is not known whether a single fibre or multiple fibres triggers the onset of malignancy: each situation is as likely as the other. 46 Although the single hit theory, 47 to which the final sentence of the above quotation refers, is no more than speculation, its simplicity has made it unduly influential. Epidemiologically informed opinion now sees the development of mesothelioma as a multi-stage process, requiring perhaps as many as seven genetic changes before a normal cell (in the lining of the lungs or the abdomen) becomes malignant. The role which asbestos plays in these various stages remains unknown and it is no less clear whether one or more fibres must be present. However, there remains a clear consensus that increased exposure to asbestos will increase the risk of incurring this cancer but, in the event of a sequence of separate periods of exposure, current science cannot identify the one in which the condition was initiated. In part, this is because the disease first manifests itself several years after exposure. Epidemiology suggests that the median period between exposure and diagnosis is 30 years. It is so rare for this period to be less than ten years that exposures within ten years of diagnosis may be excluded as causal. Mesothelioma is, to use the legal (but not medical) term, indivisible, as distinct from asbestosis which is divisible or cumulative since, once the threshold is exceeded, all inhaled fibres contribute proportionately and progressively to lung dysfunction. 46 Above n 3, para It was a politician who brought this theory into the public arena: We must therefore assume that a single fibre could do real damage which may not even be seen for 20 years or more John Gummer (as Under Secretary of State for Employment on 28 July 1983) Asbestos (Power Stations) Hansard 46 ( ) 1411.11 JUDICIAL APPROACHES TO CONTESTED CAUSATION Fairchild (2001) In Fairchild Curtis J refused recovery to the estate of a victim of mesothelioma, who had worked in a number of buildings where asbestos was present. Two former owners of buildings were sued but, since there was no evidence of significant differences between the respective levels of exposure, the claimant was unable to establish on the balance of probabilities that the breaches of duty by either defendant were a cause or a material contribution to the deceased s mesothelioma. 48 Five months later, Mr Justice Mitting took a very different view of a case with very similar evidential circumstances Edwin Matthews was suing two of the 15 employers who had exposed him to asbestos during aworking life which ended, at the age of 54, with the onset of mesothelioma. After a lengthy rehearsal of their Lordships speeches in both McGhee and Wilsher, he relied upon the former to justify his award of damages against both defendants: The claimant was exposed by each defendant and by both defendants, to asbestos fibres, in quantities sufficient greatly to increase his risk of contracting mesothelioma. 49 How was it that two judges, when faced with remarkably similar cases, could construct two equally robust arguments to justify diametrically opposed rulings? Figure 2 attempts to generalize the situation of a mesothelioma claimant whose working life has involved a sequence of periods, of varying duration, of employment (E 1, E 2..., E N )each of which has involved negligent exposure to asbestos dust. The top line of Fig. 2 depicts the successive exposures contributing to the total risk of incurring the disease the greater the exposure (both in terms of duration and concentrations of fibres) the greater its contribution to the total risk. But beyond that statement of the accumulation of risk, current science can play no further part in the forensic process. Is it possible to consider each period of employment in turn, and ask the question: is this the one (E G in the bottom line of Fig. 2) during which the fibre which caused the cancer was inhaled? Dr Rudd, the expert witness in Fairchild and Matthews, was quite adamant that science cannot answer that question. 50 Even if it were possible to identify the point at which DNA damage first occurred, there is no reason to suppose that asbestos was implicated then rather than at some other point in the multi-stage process. It was this scientific evidence which persuaded Curtis J to conclude that:... it simply cannot be said in this case: (i) whether a single fibre of asbestos is more or less likely to have caused the disease (ii) whether more than one fibre is more or less likely to have caused the disease (iii) even if multiple fibres are responsible, it cannot be shown that it is more likely than not those fibres came from one source 48 Above n1. 49 Above n2at18f. 50 The author has had the benefit of discussions with Dr Rudd on the evidence he gave in Fairchild which, he asserted, was virtually identical to that which he gave in Matthews.12 130 C. MILLER CUMULATIVE RISK (of incurring mesothelioma) E 1 E 2 E 3 E G E N 1 E N was the guilty fibre inhaled during period of employment E i? no no no no no yes no no FIG.2.The rival interpretations of a generalized Fairchild case. (iv) no Court could find on the facts of this case that the deceased s fatal disease was caused cumulatively by the exposures at [the premises of the defendants]. 51 It was effectively the same evidence which led Mitting J to apply McGhee when holding that, since both defendants had added to Mr Matthews risk, both were liable. Why, when faced with the two approaches, should the Court of Appeal adopt that of Curtis J? The single hit theory of mesothelioma causation fosters a belief in the independence of multiple exposures to asbestos. It invites civil lawyers to adopt the mindset and the language 52 of criminal law and to search for the fibre which was guilty in the same sense as the bullet which severs a murder victim s aorta. But on this occasion, since no one defendant met the civil (p > 50%) standard of proof of being the employer supplying the guilty fibre, none could be held liable. The Court of Appeal and Curtis J have in effect argued that in cases like Fairchild the second part of the claimant s task is to identify the one defendant who passes the p > 50% test. The reason that little attention was devoted to the first part in Fairchild was because there was so little further cause for dispute as to causation it was not denied that the claimant had been exposed to far greater concentrations of asbestos than could ever be experienced by those not employed in asbestos related work. Mesothelioma is a condition with an exceptionally high specificity in the causes : 53 fewer than 5% of mesothelioma cases arise in people with no known exposure to asbestos, thus any search for an alternative cause of mesothelioma in a person occupationally exposed to asbestos is almost sure to prove fruitless. Thus, the first part of the claimant s task the construction of causal paths leading to mesothelioma in which a tortious exposure to asbestos appears is straightforward. The second part, as conventionally understood persuading the judge to accept one of these employers E G as the owner of the fibre(s) which probably (degree of belief > 50%) caused the cancer is simply not possible. The defendants were relying 51 Above n1. 52 In Fairchild, the Court of Appeal uses the word culprit to denote the employer whose fibre(s) initiated the mesothelioma, above n 3 para M. Susser The logic of Sir Karl Popper and the practice of epidemiology (1986) 124 American Journal of Epidemiology 711 at 713. Specificity forms one of the nine criteria, proposed by the epidemiologist A. Bradford Hill, which must be satisfied before a statistical association can be taken to imply (the inductive leap) an underlying causal mechanism, see A. B. Hill The environment and disease: association or causation? (1965) 58 Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine 295 at 297.13 JUDICIAL APPROACHES TO CONTESTED CAUSATION 131 upon an argument which is better described as quasifactual rather than counterfactual: while each of the causal paths (E 1, E 2,..., E N ) can be imagined by the layperson, none was advocated or even recognized by the scientists appearing for either party. 3.3 Other personal injury cases involving multiple defendants Notwithstanding the Court of Appeal ruling in Fairchild, there have been English personal injury cases in which the p > 50% rule has not precluded recovery even though the claimant was unable to identify the one defendant whose negligence could be said to have caused the harm. Bryce v. Swan Hunter Group plc & others (1987) When hearing this case in February 1987, Mr Justice Phillips was faced with two Court of Appeal applications of McGhee (in Wilsher and in Hotson) which were later to be overturned, but that did not (as Curtis J implied in Fairchild 54 ) make his application of McGhee necessarily erroneous. 55 On the contrary, the ruling in Bryce (with its close evidential similarities to Fairchild) seems to encapsulate the Lords original intentions in McGhee, namely to prevent negligent employers escaping liability when scientific uncertainty makes the burden of proof unduly onerous: Whether the defendants breaches of duty merely added to the number of possible initiators of mesothelioma within the lungs of Mr Bryce, or whether they also produced a cumulative effect on the reduction of his body s defence mechanism, they increase the risk of his developing mesothelioma. He developed mesothelioma. Each of the defendants must accordingly be taken to have caused the mesothelioma by its breach of duty. 56 In the light of the most recent cases, it is interesting to note that Phillips J found for the Bryce estate despite having a clear awareness that a rigid application of the p > 50% rule was not available to either party: It follows that it is not possible for the plaintiff to prove on balance of probabilities that the additional fibres inhaled by Mr Bryce as the result of breaches of duty by either defendant were a cause of his mesothelioma. It is equally impossible for either of the defendants to prove on balance of probabilities that their breaches of duty were not at least a contributory cause of Mr Bryce contracting the disease It follows that [Phillips, J s] finding [in Bryce] that the plaintiff could successfully invoke the principle in McGhee as then understood cannot assist. above n Although the interregnum may explain why Phillips J, despite his clear desire to apply McGhee, declared it an authority which I have had some difficulty in understanding, Bryce v. Swan Hunter Group plc and others [1988] 1 All ER 658 at ibid at ibid.14 132 C. MILLER Fitzgerald v. Lane (1987) In this case, 58 the claimant had suffered tetraplegia in a road accident to which he had contributed by walking onto a pelican crossing with the light showing red, whereupon he was knocked down by one car and deflected into the path of another. Both car drivers were held to have been negligent; but medical witnesses could not agree which of four 59 impacts had caused the fracture of the spine. Although the deputy judge s understanding of McGhee was not influenced by Mustill LJ s judgement in Wilsher (which came three weeks later), his conclusion on causation is still confusing: My conclusion is that although I am satisfied that it is probable that the first collision did not cause the spinal injury there is an equal probability of the three subsequent impacts having been the cause, and, therefore, each of the defendants must bear the responsibility. 60 By equal he could not mean equal to that probability which persuaded him that the first collision did not cause the spinal injury. If by equal he meant a 33% degree of belief that any one of the three subsequent impacts could have caused the injury then, since the second defendant was responsible for only one (the final) impact, he should not have been found liable. Although there was nothing in the medical evidence to suggest that the three later impacts contributed equally and cumulatively to the injury, the need to apply McGhee was not in doubt and he found both defendants liable. 61 By the time the defendants appeal required causation to be re-examined, the Court of Appeal considered its judgement in Wilsher, and the speech of Mustill, LJ in particular, to be authority. None of the judges believed the injury to have been the cumulative result of the collisions; a clear sense of the independence of the effects of the impacts is apparent in all three speeches. Holtby v. Brigham & Cowan (Hull) Ltd (2000) Mr Holtby suffered asbestosis after working, as a marine fitter, in conditions where exposure to asbestos dust was commonplace. He succeeded in claiming damages from the firm which had employed him for about half this period. But in recognition of the contribution to the injury from other employers, Altman HHJ reduced the general damages by 25%; Mr Holtby appealed against this reduction. In the Court of Appeal, counsel for the claimant relied on both Bonnington and McGhee to argue for restoration of full damages. The exposures in the current case were consecutive but the principle in Bonnington, where they were concurrent, could and should still apply. But Stuart-Smith LJ was not prepared to accept this submission without qualification. Instead, he referred to a 1984 occupational 58 Fitzgerald v. Lane [1987] 2 All ER First impact with car 1, second impact with (the windscreen of) car 1, impact with the ground, impact with car Above n 58 at By adding to the uncertainty of the evidence of a case brought against the first driver, the second becomes liable for what Ariel Porat and Alex Stein, in Tort Liability under Uncertainty (2001, Oxford University Press), propose as the tort of evidential damage.15 JUDICIAL APPROACHES TO CONTESTED CAUSATION 133 deafness case 62 in which Mustill, J (as he then was), whilst acknowledging Bonnington as authority, was prepared to reduce damages in respect of damage incurred in the period before the effects of industrial noise were fully realized by medical science. In contrast, Clarke LJ (in Holtby) preferred to rely upon a 1957 pneumoconiosis case, 63 to argue that once the claimant has established that one defendant s negligence made a material contribution he should recover in full unless that defendant could prove that a definable part of [the injury] was caused either by innocent asbestos or guilty asbestos caused by others. 64 It would appear from Holtby that once one defendant is found liable under the Bonnington rule, then it is open to that defendant, if he is so inclined, to apportion or to transfer liability in an effort to reduce damages. Once a scientific consensus is reached on a cumulative aetiology and it is accepted that all dust contributes to the final disability 65 then, ceteris paribus, division of damages according to the durations of different (namely non-tortious and those of other defendants) exposures becomes one simple and obvious means of doing justice to all parties. Allen v. British Rail Engineering Ltd (2001) The Court of Appeal revisited the question of apportionment more recently in a case 66 concerned with another divisible occupational disease, vibration white finger. After restating the original position in Bonnington, itdeveloped the case law to take account of other tortfeasors ( there can be cases where the state of the evidence is such that it is just to recognize each of two separate tortfeasors as having caused the whole of the damage... ) and other contributions to the injury (... in principle the amount of the employer s liability will be limited to the extent of the contribution which his tortious conduct made to the employee s disability ). However, the ruling in Allen then makes it clear that it is for the court to do the best it can in on the evidence to make the apportionment..., 67 thus refuting the suggestion, from Holtby, that the onus passes to the defendant to establish the extent to which other person(s) contributed to the claimant s injury. Was the p > 50% rule suspended in Holtby? The judge was satisfied that material contributions to injury had been made; there remained uncertainty (as in Bonnington) as to the relative amounts of those contributions but not as to the identities of those responsible. The rule was not suspended: the judge had a degree of belief > 50% in the scenario, constructed by the claimant, in which each tortfeasor was seen as having made a contribution (but not one capable of precise quantification) which added to the overall injury. Was it suspended in cases like Bryce and Fitzgerald when the judge, relying on McGhee, imposed liability on two tortfeasors whose responsibility for actual harm could not be divided? Again, we are not forced to conclude that it was suspended: it was used to 62 Thompson v. Smiths Repairers (North Shields) Ltd [1984] 1 All ER 881, [1984] QB 405. Interestingly Mustill J considered McGhee to have little relevance to this case where the evidential gap (in the cause of occupational deafness) was far less. 63 Nicholson v. Atlas Steel Foundry and Engineering Co Ltd [1957] 1 All ER Above n4at Above n4at Allen v. British Rail Engineering Ltd [2001] EWCA Civ ibid para 20.16 134 C. MILLER test the likelihood of the scenario, with its ineluctable uncertainty of causation, which the claimant had constructed in the first part of his task. 3.4 Multiple defendant drug companies In the negligent sportsmen case of Summers v. Tice, 68 the plaintiff was injured in the eye by a shotgun pellet which could have come from the gun of either of two fellow hunters. Since each shot is sufficient to cause the harm, neither can be necessary and therefore neither hunter can, according to the but for or the simple NESS test, be held liable. The California Supreme Court refused to be bound by paradox and imposed joint and several liability on both defendants. The more recent decision of this court in Sindell v. Abbott Laboratories 69 is more germane to this discussion. Here the plaintiff sued 11 companies which manufactured or marketed diethylstilbestrol (DES) a drug which was implicated in increased cancer rates in the daughters of women who had taken it to prevent miscarriage. The Court held that, having proved negligence and causation, she was entitled to recover from each defendant in proportion to that defendant s sales of the drug. A number of DES daughters in the Netherlands sued 70 all the companies that marketed DES in that country. The Dutch Supreme Court applied an alternative causation rule under which the claimants could recover full compensation from any of the companies. A defendant could escape liability by establishing that it had not sold DES to the particular plaintiff. The same court adopted a similar approach in an asbestos case 71 in which one former employer was required to pay full compensation even though an earlier employer, not sued, had also exposed the plaintiff to asbestos dust. Again the defendant could escape liability by proving that the other employer was the source of the offending fibres the impossibility of that task appears to have been understood by the court. It is tempting to interpret this judgement as transferring the whole burden of proof. But this is misleading: it fails to recognize that the claimant must first complete his conventional task (namely construct a credible account of the risks which were actualized in the genesis of his mesothelioma) before a defendant is given an opportunity to inculpate someone else. Imagine a case in which a group of mesothelioma victims (or their estates) successfully sued all the employers who had negligently exposed them to asbestos. Adapting the Sindell approach (see Fig. 3), the total damages could be divided among the defendants in proportion to, not market share, but the number of person-years of exposure for which each was responsible. An equally equitable apportionment of the costs according to the risk imposed could be achieved by an insurance scheme in which the premium paid by an employer were proportional to the person-years of tortious exposure for which he had been responsible. (In the absence of data on average fibre concentrations experienced by each claimant, person-years of exposure offers the best available surrogate measure of risk imposed.) Given the identification of all the victims of a group of employers and an accurate record of their employment with no negligent employers omitted, then the amount paid by each employer reflects the overall cost of the injuries his negligence caused. 72 In Cal. 2d 80, 199 P.2d 1 (1948) Cal. 3d 588, 607 P.2d 924 (1980). 70 Dutch Supreme Court, 9 October 1992, [1994] Nederlandse Jurisprudentie Dutch Supreme Court, 25 June 1993, [1993] Nederlandse Jurisprudentie See D. Kaye, above n 16 at 509.17 JUDICIAL APPROACHES TO CONTESTED CAUSATION 135 Let d i represent the damages awarded to claimant i and let n ik represent the number of years in which he was negligently exposed to asbestos by employer k; if D represents the total damages to be paid by all employers found liable, then the amount e k to be paid by employer k is given by: e k = (D/ N) x n ik and d i = (D/ N) x n ik i k where N= n ik and D = e k = d i i k k i FIG.3. Applying Sindell to the generalized Fairchild case. reality, few schemes, whether tort-based or not, could approach this ideal, but they offer the possibility of corrective justice for the victims whilst serving as a deterrent to other asbestos employers. The single-fibre theory led the Court of Appeal, via an orthodox application of the p > 50% rule, to a judgement in Fairchild in which neither of these traditional aims of tort was fulfilled. 4. Contested causation after Fairchild 4.1 Fairchild in the House of Lords (2002) In reversing the Court of Appeal s decision in the conjoined appeals in Fairchild, 73 the House was motivated primarily by policy considerations. Lord Bingham was of the opinion that such injustice as may be involved in imposing liability on a duty-breaking employer [who had not caused damage] is heavily outweighed by the injustice of denying redress to a victim. 74 But the ruling still had to accord with principle and authority. The extent to which the House was able to effect that reconciliation will be the subject of considerable debate by academic analysts as well as legal practitioners. The aims of this paper are best served by concentrating upon those parts of this long ( word) judgement which are most concerned with the concept of risk and the circumstances under which liability attaches to acts and omissions which impose risks upon others. Lord Bingham relied upon various Australian 75 and Canadian 76 cases which questioned the assertion that the but for test constitutes the exclusive test of causation in negligence. He (and three of the other judges) noted with approval the ruling of the Californian Supreme Court in an asbestos case which held that [p]laintiffs cannot be expected to prove the scientifically unknown details of carcinogenesis, or trace the unknowable path of a given asbestos fiber. But the impossibility of such proof does not dictate use of a burden shift. 77 He then considered a long line of occupational injury 73 Fairchild HL, above n ibid para Naxakis v. Western General Hospital (1999) 197 CLR Snell v. Farrell [1990] 2 SCR Rutherford v. Owens-Illinois Inc 67 Cal. Rptr. 2d 16 (1997).18 136 C. MILLER cases 78 before giving a detailed analysis of arguments presented at various stages of McGhee a case which, he concluded, remains sound authority. Lord Hoffman also rejected the Court of Appeal s application, in Fairchild, of the traditional but for test of causation. He went on to identify five significant features of the instant appeals: 1. a duty to protect employees from the risk of incurring a particular disease 2. that duty creates a civil right to compensation for injury relevantly connected with its breach 3. a positive dose/risk relationship (between exposure to asbestos and mesothelioma) is established 4. no provable link between any given exposure and the cell mutation which leads ultimately to mesothelioma 5. the employee contracts the disease against which he should have been protected. 79 He then argued that it is possible to identify analogues of these five features in McGhee. In that case, the House decided, as a matter of legal principle, that materially increasing the risk that [dermatitis] would occur was sufficient to satisfy the causal requirement for liability. 80 Like Lord Bingham, Lord Hoffman was at pains to refute the suggestion, made by Lord Bridge in Wilsher, that McGhee involved no more than a legitimate inference of fact arising from a robust and pragmatic approach. 81 To Lord Hoffman, it was quite clear that judges could not make for themselves those inferences of fact which the expert witnesses had declined to make. McGhee involved a principle of law and, he insisted, the important question was how narrowly [that principle] should be confined. 82 Justice was to be done to the appellants in Fairchild,but not at the cost of widening the applicability of the McGhee principle. This limitation exercise was achieved by reaffirming Wilsher and the reasoning which had required that case to be distinguished from McGhee. Notwithstanding their rejection of part of Lord Bridge s speech, Lords Bingham and Hoffman expressed their approval of the argument, originally articulated by Browne- Wilkinson V-C, that the defining circumstance of McGhee was that there was only one possible agent [of] the dermatitis 83 as compared with five possible agents of Wilsher s condition. The contrary view, taken by Mustill LJ in Wilsher, that the shape of the enhanced risk should not be a crucial factor was explicitly rejected. The shape or the manner in which a negligent act or omission increases or continues a risk of injury is now seen as central in determining liability. The point can be illustrated by elaborating Lord Hoffman s fourth significant feature : Fairchild: science cannot identify, among the various sources of inhaled asbestos, the one which was putatively implicated in the cell mutation which subsequently led to the claimant s mesothelioma; 78 Bonnington above n 23, Nicholson above n 63, Gardiner v. Motherwell Machinery and Scrap Co Ltd [1961] 1 WLR Fairchild HL, above n5atpara ibid para ibid para 70, Lord Hutton inclined to that view, but he was in a minority. 82 ibid para Above n 33 at 779.19 JUDICIAL APPROACHES TO CONTESTED CAUSATION 137 McGhee: science could not distinguish between two classes of skin abrasion (one caused by dust during the working shift and the other arising from dust which, in the absence of a shower, continued to irritate the skin) as the cause of dermatitis. The factors common to both cases are (1) scientific uncertainty and (2) the negligent act or omission increases an existing and similar form ( the agent of injury was the same ) of risk. This existing risk may arise from a tortious source (a previous asbestos employer in Fairchild) or a non-tortious one (pre-shower dust in McGhee). Simply adding another source of risk is not sufficient. The failure to control the oxygen supply added to the risk that Martin Wilsher might develop retrolental fibroplasia, but that negligent failure was one of five clearly differentiable sources of risk of that condition. If McGhee represents a solution to the two-body problem of contested causation, judges may apply it to an n-body problem (like Fairchild or Sindell 84 ) only if it displays the five significant features identified by Lord Hoffman. Of these five, the fourth encapsulates the gist of McGhee: first, the negligent act must increase a similar form 85 of risk and, secondly, science must be unable to ascribe a causal role to any one of the sources of risk. Lord Hoffman did not see Sindell, in spite of its similarities to Fairchild, as falling within the McGhee principle: the existence of a multiplicity of manufacturers of, or retail outlets for, a defective drug does not increase the risk posed to any one consumer. However, it is the similar form condition which is most likely to disturb the precarious compromise between policy and principle which the House s ruling in Fairchild entails. Suppose that mesothelioma could arise from some form of dust, other than asbestos, to which a claimant has been exposed by one of his negligent employers. Even with the same level of uncertainty in aetiology, does the existence of another dust and a different causal mechanism take such a case into the orbit of Wilsher? Lord Hoffman was clearly aware that excluding such a case from McGhee was less than principled. In Fairchild,the House made only passing reference to Fitzgerald v. Lane, 86 and there was no suggestion that that case had been wrongly decided. But it is instructive to reconsider that case in the light of the Lords latest interpretation of McGhee. If the four impacts suffered by Mr Fitzgerald were clearly dissimilar in their forms and effects, then a Wilsher case seems to emerge; but if the second, third and fourth impacts were to be treated as of the same form as the first then, given the evidential uncertainty, this case stays within the scope of McGhee (as the Court of Appeal, in their 1987 ruling, felt it should). 4.2 Hotson revisited The possibility of extending the McGhee principle by relaxing the similar risk condition was hinted at by Lords Hoffman and Hutton. In Hotson, 87 the negligence took 84 Above n If the phrase same agent of injury is to be taken literally, and if my similar form of risk is too liberal an interpretation, then it is possible that only negligent omissions are capable of satisfying the McGhee principle. An omission involves no interruption in the course of events leading to the injury and thus same agent condition is necessarily satisfied. Moreover, if there is no empirical means of distinguishing between pre-omission and postomission effects (X and N, infig. 1) then the two elements of the gist of McGhee (scientific uncertainty and similarity of risk) are not independent. 86 Above n Above n 34.20 138 C. MILLER the form of an omission, namely, the delay in correctly diagnosing the patient s condition, and the similar risk (from damaged blood vessels) condition was clearly satisfied. So how exactly must we modify McGhee, as understood in 2002, so that it might assist Hotson-like claimants to recover? Imagine that research convinces (degree of belief = 1 0) one out of every two consultant dermatologists that showering immediately after exposure to brick dust fails to prevent the onset of dermatitis, whilst the remainder within that medical specialism keeps an open mind (p = 0 5). Uncertainty in causation of dermatitis is now the same in both quality (i.e. epistemic) and in quantity (probability that negligent omission caused harm = 0 25) as that which arose in Hotson. Imagine also that this figure of 0.25 becomes more widely accepted when further research indicates that possession of a skin type, which responds positively to showering, requires a certain gene carried by one in four persons. The probability that James McGhee (or any other employee) has the gene is now an objective probability of If we further postulate the derivation of some test for that gene, we have constructed the logical equivalent of Hotson as understood by Stephen Perry. 88 This genetic test is equivalent to his hypothetical diagnostic technique which makes it possible to partition the reference class of 100 persons into the twenty-five who were treatable and the seventy-five who were not. Since there is now no doubt who is treatable and who is not, a Hotson injury is either caused (p = 1) by the negligent diagnosis or it is not (p = 0) and thus, according to Perry, to speak of risk damage as actionable harm in itself 89 is meaningless. He asserts that the claim that the plaintiff suffered risk damage must surely be independent of knowledge of this kind. But the knowledge which he postulates an unequivocal determination of treatability is of a kind which takes cases like Hotson outside the orbit of the authorities, especially McGhee, in which risk, chance, uncertainty and cognate concepts are central. The point is that the knowledge which Perry requires did not exist at the time of Hotson s misdiagnosis nor at the ensuing trials. Although the Lords did not debate the status of risk damage when deciding McGhee, it was the absence of similar (medical) knowledge or, more precisely, an awareness of the consequences of that absence for the plaintiff that motivated the 1972 ruling. When the House heard Hotson, Lord Mackay s submission that a degree of belief of 0.25 was equivalent, in law, to claiming that the delayed diagnosis played no part in the claimant s condition 90 was an orthodox application of the balance of probabilities which made no concession to the ruling in McGhee. His speech hinted that McGhee might not survive a forthcoming case (probably Wilsher) in which it was to be reviewed. In the light of the House s recent renewal of confidence in McGhee, and the reiteration of its reluctance to demand the impossible of claimants facing uncertainty in scientific evidence, it is instructive to ask whether Hotson might be decided differently today. If unchanged, it would mean that a quantitative estimate of risk (< 50%) still cannot finesse the balance of probabilities criterion even though it is an estimate, albeit crude, S. Perry Risk, Harm, and Responsibility in D. G. Owen (ed.) Philosophical Foundations of Tort Law (Oxford, 1995) at Above n Above n 34 at Above n 32. View more
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