1 - Introduction: surveying the field

Summary

Compensation for accidents

This book deals with certain kinds of misfortune, and in particular with injury and damage arising from accidents. Although the term ‘accident’ is a convenient one, its meaning is not straightforward, and some further explanation of the way it is used in this book is necessary. First, the word ‘accident’ will be used to cover injury and damage inflicted intentionally (as when, for example, one person deliberately assaults another), even though neither the inflicter nor the victim may consider the injury to be ‘accidental’ in the normal sense. Secondly, the term will not be confined to the technical legal sense – in this sense, injury or damage would be accidental only if it was not a foreseeable consequence of a deliberate or negligent act.

Thirdly, we are sometimes reluctant to refer to injury or damage resulting from natural causes as accidental: we might hesitate to say that a house, the roof of which was blown off by a hurricane, was damaged ‘by accident’ (although we might say that a person hit by the debris suffered an accident); or we might hesitate to say of a person who died of leukaemia that they died accidentally (although if a person, while on holiday, contracts a rare viral disease and dies soon after, we might call the death an accident). Fourthly, the term ‘accident’ is often used to refer to injury and damage which is caused by a sudden, non-repetitive, traumatic occurrence; and in this sense it is contrasted with illness or disease, which often develops gradually and has no easily identifiable starting point.