Negligence Case Summary

Intervening acts by the plaintiff. Intervening acts or novus actus interveniens by the plaintiff happened when the plaintiff’s act or omission together with the breach by the part of defendant cause the final damage. In this situation, the defendant may allege that the claimant’s conduct break the chain of causation, so as to render the defendant not liable for some, or all, of the plaintiff’s damage. The principle can be derived from the landmark case which is in the case of McKew v Holland & Hannen & Cubitts (Scotland) Ltd, where the court held that the plaintiff had placed himself in that emergency situation making his conduct though foreseeable, was unreasonable. Plaintiff’s imprudent and unreasonable conduct constituted a fresh and

In the case of Haris Arman v Berjaya TS Management Sdn Bhd & Anor, the plaintiff’s claim against the defendant arose from the death of his son, the deceased, who had purportedly fell from the exhaust room of the 7th floor of the building of Berjaya Times Square Shopping Mall, Kuala Lumpur. Despite it being dark, the deceased had entered the exhaust room and was found to have fallen from the 7th floor. The plaintiff thus alleged negligence on the part of the defendant’s that had resulted in the death of the deceased at the defendants’ premises. The court held that, the deceased action in entering the exhaust room despite the presence of visible directional signs along the walkway of the 7th floor of the defendant’s premises pointing to the toilet and the signage on the door of the exhaust room indicated he acted negligently, unreasonably and recklessly and further his action was unforeseeable. No reasonable person would have acted as what the deceased did given the facts matrix of this case. Thus, the defendants are said to be not liable for the unreasonable conduct of the plaintiff which is

There was an on-going problem with the ship's thermosensor in the high temperature cooling line. A discussion about repairing or replacing the thermosensor took place in the officers' smoking room where the second engineer described how he had loosened the hexagonal nut on a similar thermosensor and in consequence had been drenched with water while the chief engineer expressed the view that a defective sensor could be changed, without shutting the system down. A few days later, the claimant changed the thermosensor. He did not, however, follow the procedure discussed in the smoking room and caused damage. The court held that, the claimant was contributorily negligent on the basis that not only was the belief unreasonable, but a failure to check and take proper precautions were