Gross negligence

The basic principles of tort A Jolly Contrarian guide to loving thy neighbour™ →Go uptown The ladder of liability In some strands of legal endeavour (notably in the criminal law and the tortious world of civil wrong-doing), your mental state is important in assessing your responsibility for what you done; in others (principally the cool and dispassionate law of contract) it is, for the most part, not. Contracts are contracts, your signed up voluntarily; why you didn’t do what you said you would is beside the point. This is less so for the criminal law and relations between unacquainted neighbours, where we impute certain standards of care. Where the inadvertent is blameless, neither knowing the risk she runs, nor being reasonably expected to be able to anticipate it; and the negligent has some civil, civic responsibility for what befalls his neighbour on the premise that, since that odious hypothetical fellow plucked from the pews of the sacred Clapham omnibus would have seen it, so should he, even though in point of fact he did not; the grossly negligent is a poor, confused, careless American; the reckless sees the risk all right, and decides to plough on and take it, notwithstanding that she might have no particular wish or expectation that a calumny should befall anyone, least of all the plaintiff. The intender, in contrast to all those above, does what he does as a matter of cold-blooded, contemptuous calculation. Now the standards as between crimes and torts diverge. We know at one end are the innocent, faultless lambs, at the other wanton brigands; but how the varying stages between fit together is by no means clear. We have had a half-hearted go, but be warned, it was a Friday afternoon, and we got approached knock-off time we swiftly lost interest. This is probably a good example of negligence. Right, where’s that beer? Criminal Tort Contract Description Inadvertence Inadvertence Inadvertence Neither intended, wanted, foresaw, nor can reasonably have been expected to foresee the calamity that in fact came about. Had no bearing on any duties, implied or explicit, arising between us. Negligence Negligence — A reasonable person in that position would have foreseen the incipient calamity which would come about by following this course of action, but our hero, in actual fact, did not. Ergo, an unreasonable person. — — Default You have agreed to do something, received consideration for it and, whether by accident or design, you didn’t do it. This is the contractual equivalent of negligence: you had a duty, and you fell short of it. — — Wilful default You have agreed to do something, received consideration for it and, on purpose, you didn’t do it. (This is the same as default, by the way. No-one cares why you didn’t do it). — — Gross negligence Even a faintly moronic person in that position would have foreseen the incipient calamity which would come about by following this course of action but our hero in actual fact did not. Ergo, a stridently moronic person. Unclear how there is room for this in a contract given normal default and the already redundant wilful default. Recklessness — — Our hero did foresee the incipient calamity and, while not wanting it, boxed on regardless. Intention — — Not only foresaw the calamity but acted fully intending it to come about. Contract — quasi-contract — quasi-agency — tort — restitution Index: Click ᐅ to expand: Tort Contract Restitution Tell me more Sign up for our newsletter — or just get in touch: for ½ a weekly 🍺 you get to consult JC. Ask about it here.

“Even a serious lapse is not likely to be enough to engage the concept of gross negligence. One is moving beyond bad mistakes to mistakes which have a very serious and often a shocking or startling (cf. “jawdropping”) quality to them.”

—Federal Republic of Nigeria v JP Morgan Chase Bank

A fish out of water

Here is a curious thing. The common law of tort, from whose loamy soil the basic idea of negligence took root, has no concept of gross negligence. Tort polices those civil relations where the parties have not agreed in advance how they should treat each other: here there are no duties, so they must be inferred, and — by reference to that mythical figure on the Clapham Omnibus — the courts derived the standard of care a reasonable person owes to her neighbours. Should you fall short of that, you have committed a tort. If you have not, you don’t. There is no “supermajority” over that, in tort, whereupon you take a heightened liability. You have a duty of care; you either observe it or you don’t.

Gross negligence, therefore, exists only in the transplanted soil of contract: a place with no need for inferred duties of care at all. SO we are already in a fairly weird place, which is why so many legal eagles are confused about it.

For an essay on the related question “why would one use negligence in a contract at all?” see the article about “contractual negligence”. For a short answer to that question try this: Unless one has an indemnity, one shouldn’t.`

For a short one, try this:

In broad terms, common law liability arises between two parties when one breaches its express or implied duties to the other.

Express duties are easy. The parties agree them advance. They are governed by the law of contract. The standard of care is “did you do what you agreed to do?” A party’s state of mind when it fails to do so (whether wilful, inadvertent or something in between) doesn’t matter.

Did you carry out your duty, or didn't you?

(There is a world of nuance in framing those duties — see below — but once framed, the question is binary.)

Where the parties have not agreed their respective duties in advance, the courts must imply them. This they do through the law of tort, extruding them from abstract ideas like the duty of care, the neighbour principle, and the mythical man* on the Clapham Omnibus.

(*Easily triggered: do not Google “Fardell v Potts”. Those of a robust constitution might enjoy it)

Again, much nuance required to frame the scope and extent of that duty, but once framed, it is a binary question. Did you meet your standard of care, or not?

The rationale for the bar on concurrent liability in contract and tort is thus clear: contract applies where you have agreed duties, tort where you have not. A duty inferred from abstract basic principles should not override a deliberate pre-allocation of actual risks.

So what does a covenant “not to be negligent” add to a contract? If it means anything, it is “do not fall short of your common law duty”. Since that duty is wholly defined by the contract, it just means “do not breach the contract”. It adds nothing.

Now, gross negligence. This sounds like a tortious concept, but isn’t. You are liable in tort for normal negligence. This is a definitional thing: whatever you are liable for is, QED, negligence. There is no inner circle of hell wherein more terrible tortious penalties accrue.

So gross negligence is a creature of contract. It wasn't judge-made. One day a commercial lawyer managed to get “gross negligence” into a contract and the rest is history. US courts and, more recently, English ones have been wrestling with it ever since.

But there is no room for evaluating how carelessly one acts when breaching a contract. It is binary. You either breach it or you do not. You can have acted with unimpeachable faith, in the most prudent and dovish way, but if you didn't do what you promised, you are liable.

Interposing a behavioural standard into a contract, therefore, makes a category error.

Now, when framing contractual duties themselves, we impose performance standards, short of “must at all costs”, all the time: “best reasonable endeavours”, ”all practicable steps”, “may, but is not obliged to”— that kind of thing.

But these performance standards necessarily define what is “normal negligence” in the contractual context — that is, what counts as a simple breach of contract. No-one of them undermines the binary nature of liability for breach.

The world — the new world especially — is awash with contracts riddled with gross negligence (in both senses?), it is true. This is a burden for our learned friends in the QBD and ninth circuit. (Reserve Bank of Nigeria v JP Morgan Chase Bank refers)

But for all us commercial attorneys out there, making these instruments for courts to unpick: come on. We can do better.

A spiritually bankrupt concept

When negotiating to save the adjective “gross” from the oblivion it so richly deserves, your best tack — and it’s not great — is to say “look, if we muck up, we’re hardly going to stand on ceremony, are we? So don’t worry about the legal docs”.

This is not an edifying position for a lawyer to take, implying as it does that therefore you may as well not have a legal document at all. And it begs the question: if you don’t really mean it, why are you bothering to insist on “gross” negligence in the first place?

After all, if you’re negligent, you’re negligent. It is hard to maintain your dignity against the complaint of an innocent, irate and out-of-pocket client by saying you’ve only been a bit negligent.

A good way of looking at this is to put it in the language of the laity. Like many other commonplaces of the Rechtsadlerkanon, legal drafting can dress outright daftitude in sombre vestments. Take the time-worn indemnity for costs, framed in usual legal kapusta:

“Customer hereby agrees to indemnify and keep indemnified Company on demand for all costs, beyond its ordinary costs of performance, that Company shall incur in the absence of aforesaid Company’s negligence, fraud or wilful misconduct.”

Adding the adjective “gross” here seems to add no more than a prudent pinch of pepper to this cabbage:

“Customer hereby agrees to indemnify and keep indemnified Company on demand for all costs, beyond its ordinary costs of performance, that Company shall incur in the absence of aforesaid Company’s gross negligence, fraud or wilful misconduct.”

But now render this same idea in the earthy metre of those who ride the Clapham omnibus.

“You must reimburse us for any extraordinary costs we could not reasonably avoid when providing you our services.”

Now it is a bit harder to “hide the weasel” if you’ll indulge the expression: not because the grammar is challenging, but because it sounds so preposterous when you do:

“You must reimburse us for any extraordinary costs we could not, without being reckless, avoid when providing you our services.”

Not reckless? could you not be a bit more committal than that?

English law

“Gross” versus “casual” negligence

Is there anything to be gained, under an English law contract from restricting your liability to losses occasioned by gross, as opposed to ordinary, casual, everyday, run-of-the-mill negligence?

It is hard to sustain in the face of stout objection. On one hand, these days, gross negligence does seem to mean something at English law — obiter — it’s just that it is not entirely clear what:

“Certainly the last time this issue came before the Court of Appeal they decided that the debate about its meaning was a “somewhat sterile and semantic one.” (Linklaters publication)

What is gross negligence?

What case law there is suggests that, since both terms do get used in English law contracts, there must be some distinction. From the declarers of the common law, this is quite a piece of tail wagging dog work.

The important factors in distinguishing between plain negligence and gross negligence appear to be:

• The seriousness of the error
• The seriousness of the resulting risk.
• Something more fundamental than a simply failure to exercise proper skill or care: a “serious indifference” to an obvious risk.
• Failing to comply with a duty of care by a significant margin.

Note in particular the seriousness of the risk or loss which eventuates.

Put it this way, if your negligence results in a £10,000,000 loss, it is going to be a curious court indeed which concludes this was a mere trifling matter, and the right outcome is for the innocent party to bear the loss, and the one who causes it, by negligence, being allowed to walk away.

This outcome might be different in the American courts (see below).

New York law

Gross negligence is a thing across the ditch, and it is apparently sheeted directly the wantonness of the error, rather than (as seems to be the case in English law) the outcome of the carelessness. It requires something more like recklessness than simple carelessness.

See also

• Degrees of liability