Common law damages cannot be awarded in respect of a purely equitable wrong such as breach of trust or breach of fiduciary duty. Instead, a compensatory remedy has developed in equity’s exclusive (or inherent) jurisdiction: equitable compensation. This remedy originated in cases involving breach of trust, although for many years it was not explicitly recognised as a compensatory remedy and was known instead as one of the forms of ‘account’ that a trustee must make when a breach of trust occurs. It is therefore necessary to have a brief look at the main forms of account, which are still used today.

This chapter provides an overview of the legal and medical principles that underpin medical negligence litigation, including the definition of medical negligence, what constitutes a psychiatric injury, the psychiatric evaluation and practical issues which commonly arise, when undertaking a psychiatric assessment in the context of clinical negligence litigation. After criminal negligence, the elements of civil negligence are set out including duty of care and standard of care. Legal concepts of causation and psychiatric injury differ from medical or scientific causation. The professional obligations on the forensic psychiatry as expert are to be neutral and objective, to obtain and document consent, to structure how instructions are taken and how reports are written in the light of court guidelines. As with all areas of medicine, the expert must comply with the ethical, professional and legal obligations of doctors. Patient privacy and confidentiality of personal health information must be protected. Most, if not all, patients referred by their solicitors, or by the defendant medical indemnity body, will already feel betrayed and let down by the medical profession. They will be fearful and distrustful. On the other side, there is a clinician who fears reputational damage.

Families continue to provide immense financial and psychosocial support to their student age children. ‘Estranged students’ and those who are themselves carers suffer financial, academic and social obstacles to a successful university experience. Parents now expect greater participation in the lives of their student children, as financial realities empower them to influence their children’s choices. From age 18 students are deemed ‘adults’, but without adult rights to an independent student loan, or legal compulsion on their parents to provide finance. Parents have little feedback or power over the resource they are asked to finance. Communication between universities and parents has attracted controversy. Universities are experimenting with ways to clarify how nominated carers can be consulted about students at risk. Families may become the unsupported carers when a student has left university in an unplanned way, as well as when the course comes to an end. The chapter considers the value of developing a ‘leavers’ programme’, analogous to freshers weeks, as well as a specific package of supports for students who leave in an unplanned way.

In recent years, fiduciary law has moved toward the center of scholarly attention in the common law world.1 In spite of its “elusive” nature,2 enough instances of fiduciary relationships occur across a wide variety of legal areas that many – with good cause – describe it as a distinctive field.3 Courts as well as scholars in common law jurisdictions deal concepts and ideas concerning fiduciary law back and forth.4 Although civil law countries have no tradition of the trust as a legal institution,5 courts and scholars alike term relationships based on some kind of personal or professional trust “fiduciary.”6 German law subjects guardians,7 trustees in bankruptcy,8 attorneys,9 and others to a specific set of fiduciary duties, the most important of which is a duty of loyalty.10 France has introduced “la fiducie,” a substitute for the common law trust.11 Indeed, civil law countries have long combined property and contract law in order to fashion substitutes for the common law trust. Contract-based Treuhandverhältnisse – that is, relationships of trust – have been a staple part of the German legal discourse for several decades, if not centuries.12 And in recent years, the trust as a legal institution is gaining ground in civil law jurisdictions, following national recognition of the Hague Trust Convention by countries such as Italy and the Netherlands.13

To establish that a defendant is liable in negligence, the plaintiff must establish that a duty of care is owed, that the duty has been breached, and that the breach has caused damage within the scope of liability. The concept of duty of care can be the most challenging to establish because it is difficult to define it in a meaningful way. At present, where a set of facts requires us to consider whether a duty of care is owed, the following general approach is used:

1. (1) Determine whether there is a relevant precedent establishing that a duty of care is owed to a person in the plaintiff’s position by a person in the defendant’s position for this type of harm.

2. (2) If there is no established precedent (in other words it is a ‘novel’ case), balance the ‘salient’ features of the relationship (the multi-factorial approach).

   This chapter will consider the general principles of duty of care, some of the established categories of relationships of duty, as well as duty of care in novel cases.

Once the plaintiff has established that the defendant owed him or her a duty of care, the next question is whether the defendant breached that duty of care. In its broadest terms, breach is about whether the defendant has engaged in negligent conduct, which can be understood as failing to take the precautions against certain risks of harm that the reasonable person, in the circumstances, would have taken.

So how do we work out which precautions the reasonable person would have taken in the circumstances? This analysis has two main parts:

1. (1) A court determines the qualities of the reasonable person against whom the behaviour of the defendant will be compared.

2. (2) The court then decides what that reasonable person would have done if placed in the same circumstances the defendant was in.

   What the defendant actually did or did not do is then compared to that standard of expected carefulness. If the defendant’s conduct was less careful than what the court decides the hypothetical reasonable person would or would not have done, the defendant is said to have fallen below the standard of care expected of them and will have breached their duty of care.

Chapter 2 explained the main areas of the law, including the differences between civil and criminal law. This chapter will focus on one of the main parts of the civil law that is relevant for nurses: the law of negligence. The law of negligence allows a person to bring legal proceedings against another person to correct a wrong or harm that the other person has done to them. Usually the person who has been harmed (the plaintiff) will seek payment of money (called ‘damages’) in compensation for their injury from the person whose act or omission caused the harm (the defendant).

This chapter will outline the key parts of the law of negligence, with a particular focus on the special rules that have developed in relation to health-care professionals, including nurses. By understanding how the law applies to things nurses do that can cause people harm, it should be possible for nurses to better avoid acting negligently.

In Smith v. Van Gorkom, the Delaware Supreme Court held that corporate directors owe a duty of care to act on “an informed basis, in good faith, and the honest belief that the action taken was in the best interest of the company.” This holding shocked boardrooms everywhere by subjecting directors to the threat of personal liability for gross negligence in decision-making. While legislatures moved swiftly to allow corporations to adopt exculpation clauses relieving directors from these heightened standards, Van Gorkom remains a high-water mark in holding directors liable for their actions. Lua Yuille’s feminist judgment expands Van Gorkom’s reach, focusing on the homogeneity of the all-white male board and resulting in lack of diverse qualities and perspectives. She takes the revolutionary step of only affording the business judgment rule presumption to the decisions of an appropriately diverse board. In her rewritten opinion, the majority’s cramped duty of care is expanded to encompass all stakeholders, not merely shareholders. Virginia Harper Ho contextualizes the feminist judgment and explores possibility of a faith-centered feminism and its relationship to stakeholder-centric governance.

Mrs. Pritchard became the director of a family-owned reinsurance firm, Pritchard & Baird Intermediaries Corp (P & B), following the death of her husband. Mrs. Pritchard’s two sons were executives of the company, which eventually went bankrupt. The plaintiff, trustee of the P & B’s bankruptcy estate, filed this suit against the deceased Mrs. Pritchard’s estate claiming she was negligently liable as director for the over $10 million her sons improperly removed from the firm. The feminist rewrite agrees with the original opinion that Mrs. Pritchard was negligent in her role of corporate oversight, but it deviates by arguing Mrs. Pritchard was not negligent for failure to notice the financial issues because she should not have been expected to understand the intricacies of the business of which she served mostly as the figurehead and emotional glue. The rewritten opinion points out the implicit bias built within the New Jersey directors’ duty statute, which refers to “prudent men.” The commentary argues Mrs. Pritchard chose not to extend great care because she was not compensated or given much actual power within P & B. The commentary also critiques the rewritten opinion’s dismissiveness of Mrs. Pritchard’s corporate knowhow as not feminist enough.

This chapter argues for a revised theory of moderate vaccine cosmopolitanism, grounded in a Thomistic natural law interpretation of the principle of solidarity, tempered by the principle of subsidiarity. Solidarity does call for love of neighbour, and therefore for global responsibilities of mutual care among nations. However, love of neighbour does not necessitate equality of treatment and resources, or equality of care and concern. Instead, it necessitates equity: love requires shared yet differentiated duties to care for those in need, according to their needs and our relationships to the most vulnerable. So, love tolerates – and even justifies – some partiality in taking care first of those in one’s own community, without abandoning outsiders to their own luck. This understanding of solidarity is predicated on the idea of equality of dignity – meaning, equal respectful consideration and loving regard among persons and nations. Equality of dignity is consistent with treating, caring, and being concerned with different people in different ways, according to their different needs and their different relationships to us, like the principle of subsidiarity suggests.

Health and Safety within the perioperative area present unique challenges in terms of managing the unique hazards and risks that staff and patients can be exposed to. Hazards from lasers, electrical equipment, chemicals, moving and handling, exposure to noxious vapours and gases are just some of the common environmental risks staff are exposed to on a daily basis. This chapter focuses on putting some of the legislation and guidance into the perioperative context. One of the primary aims of the chapter is to foster a culture of appropriate risk assessment and safe practice which will reduce or minimise errors.

This chapter is held together by the themes of teachers, safety and the law, with special attention to those who may teach physical activities – especially outside the classroom. Some of the topics that weave their way through the various sections include legal issues, professional conduct and the legalities associated with teaching and supervision of sport, physical education and outdoor activities. The chapter takes a philosophical approach to these topics.

This chapter explores the obligations of states to hold companies accountable for their human rights impacts. It focuses squarely on the obligation of home states to increase the accountability of companies operating abroad, since the critical open questions and issues in BHR arise predominantly with regard to companies’ extraterritorial conduct. Discussions around such “home-state solutions” have become a signature feature of the BHR discussion. The chapter first takes a general conceptual look at the state duty to protect and at the state's extraterritorial obligations. It then assesses different instruments that states can use to meet such obligations in the policy, legislative, and adjudicative spaces. The discussion on legislative approaches provides an overview and assessment of different types of BHR laws with extraterritorial effects that various states have adopted in recent years. The subsection on adjudicative approaches provides a brief introduction to BHR litigation and an overview of recent seminal cases in various jurisdictions. The chapter concludes with a discussion of criticisms of such extraterritorial state measures.

I shall, first, adumbrate the sceptical challenge that arises from those views which argue that inadvertent action involves voluntariness in some deep sense of the concept. In a second step, I will suggest that we should not regard inadvertence as a block to a unified picture of moral responsibility. For, responsibility does not require voluntariness in a wholesale manner. Then I will draw on the theory and practice of the law of torts to suggest the plausibility of the distinction between responsibility and standards of fault. Subsequently, I trace a more principled foundation for this distinction in the philosophical literature: Tim Scanlon, drawing on the distinction between blame and permissibility, has demonstrated convincingly that the mental states of agents, which are relevant for determining blame, should not (in principle) feature among the grounds of the permissibility of actions. The argument submits that permissibility is determined by (objective) reasons for action while blame depends on the meaning of actions, which requires reference to (subjective) mental states of agents. I conclude by siding with authors who argue that among the grounds of responsibility is a reason not to act negligently. Notably, this displacement of negligence from voluntariness to the realm of reasons suggests that responsibility entails capacity for rational agency.