ABSTRACT
Tort law – or, more particularly, personal injury law – is a context-rich area of legal study. The ‘everydayness’ of tort cases makes them a particularly abundant field for cross-cultural perspectives.1 Patricia Peppin argues that the examination of negligence ‘requires analysis of the relatedness of people, or of people and institutions, and requires the imaginative process of placing oneself in various real and hypothetical positions’.2 She goes on to say that for this reason negligence law, in contrast to the intentional torts, has a greater potential to respond to the cultural pluralism of the late 20th century.3 The fact that, as yet, this potential has hardly been realised, probably has to do with another important fact about tort law. That is, its concern with richly diverse, relational scenarios is constrained by a framework of culturally specific, ‘objective’, individualistic approaches. The ‘reasonable man’ is perhaps the most notorious of these, but notions of reasonable foreseeability, of time, space and causality, of injury and damage, all need to be interrogated. To help with this we follow Peppin and suggest asking the following questions of negligence law: Does negligence law take account of the social reality of subordinate
groups’ place in society? Does it handle constructively, or merely reflect, the unequal nature of society?
