English tort law

English tort law is the law governing implicit civil responsibilities that people have to one another, as opposed to those responsibilities laid out in contracts. It provides legal remedies, often the payment of money, to those who have been damaged by someone else's failure to meet these implicit responsibilities. Other countries' tort laws can work quite differently.

It is to be distinguished from criminal law, which is often thought of as dealing with an individuals responsibility to the state, where a court has the power to restrict people's freedoms. Often an act can result in both a criminal and a civil case, for example if someone injures a pedestrian while driving dangerously the state may prosecute them for dangerous driving, whilst the pedestrian might bring a tort case against them failing in their responsibility to not knowingly put other people at risk. The law of tort covers several areas such as negligence, each individual tort has a certain amount of requirements needed to be met.

In English law, torts like other civil cases are generally tried in front a judge without a jury.

The word tort is derived from middle English for "injury", from Anglo-French, from Medieval Latin tortum, from Latin, neuter of tortus "twisted", from past participle of torquēre.

Following Roman law, the English system has long been based on a closed system of nominate torts, such as trespass, battery and conversion. This is in contrast to continental legal systems, which have since adopted more open systems of tortious liability. There are various categories of tort, which lead back to the system of separate causes of action. The tort of negligence is however increasing in importance over other types of tort, providing a wide scope of protection, especially since Donoghue v Stevenson. For liability under negligence a duty of care must be established owed to a group of persons to which the victim belongs, a nebulous concept into which many other categories are being pulled.

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