The man on the Clapham omnibus

"The rule that you are to love your neighbour becomes in law you must not injure your neighbour; and the lawyer's question: Who is my neighbour? receives a restricted reply. You must take reasonable care to avoid acts or omissions which you can reasonably foresee would be likely to injure your neighbour. Who, then, in law, is my neighbour? The answer seems to be - persons who are so closely and directly affected by my act that I ought reasonably to have them in contemplation as being so affected when I am directing my mind to the acts or omissions that are called in question . . ."

In Contract Law, we've been studying exemption provisions, and commonly one of the parties to the contract will want to exempt liability for negligence. The repeated mention of negligence made me think back to my Law of Torts classes last year, half of which were about negligence. The above statement of principle is from Lord Atkin's judgment in Donoghue v Stevenson, an extremely important case for Tort Law as well as for the common law in general, because it assimilates all the separate precedents relating to separate areas of negligence into one neighbour principle. I also love this judgment because it addresses an idea to which many practising the law sometimes show a willful blindness: the divide between what is moral and what is legal. Of course, the two concepts are not mutually exclusive, but they are far from the same thing. Here, Lord Atkin recognises this, but seems to make an attempt to combine them by couching a fundamental legal concept in the language of morality.

In other news, the second university semester is now in full swing. I handed in three assignments this week. I have two more to hand in next week, and a Contract Law test. It's only week four and I feel exhausted. At the end of this year I'll be 3/5 years of university done! It's exciting to be so close to entering the world of employment, but at the same time it still feels like I've only left school recently. That aside, here is a summary of my life at the moment:

Going up:

• Contract Law lectures: my professor is so entertaining and engaging that what is considered by most to be the Law degree's hardest subject is my favourite. I just hope that I do well in the exam for it.
• AULSS Executive student elections: so much better than the AUSA elections because all the candidates are my friends. It's also refreshing to see a student election where the candidates don't list "is drunk all the time" as a credential.
• Brownies: I've been sick for the last ten days, and on a couple of occasions my sister has brought home brownies for me from various Queen Street bakeries and cafes.

Going down:

• 2pm-4pm lectures: I love the subject, but at 3.30pm when I've been in lectures since 8am, I do start to feel a little dozy.
• Swine Flu: I've had it for ten days now and it's really hard to shake off. Being a small and relatively isolated community, the entire Auckland Law School seems to have got it at some point over the last three weeks.
• Kathmandu jackets: there is currently this stereotypical NZ university student image of a Kathmandu puffer jacket, a baggy t-shirt, black leggings and Keds shoes. It looks so unkempt; why must we live up to the stereotype?

Now that I've got to the end of this blog entry, I'm feeling satisfied that I have achieved something on my 'evening of rest'. Confession: I only thought to write about the tort of negligence because I felt that I had been negligent with my blog updating.