ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses two major themes: the development and challenges of multi-party actions; and, the principles and case law of negligence and nervous shock in the 20th century, including post-traumatic stress disorder, viewed through a policy lens. The strengths and weaknesses of multi-party actions and the development of legal expertise and strategies in relation to the disasters of the 1980s will be reviewed against a background of increasing official concerns about legal aid costs. Since the mid-1980s groups of individuals and their lawyers have learned to take the initiative and maintain a strong front by grouping together and sometimes achieving considerable success. Nervous shock cases are regarded as a species of negligence with its own rules of liability, this has led to criticisms of them standing out for too long as ‘an all too isolated forum for judicial articulation of the various premises underlying the application of a cause of action in negligence’.
