James Goudkamp (along with his co-author, Professor Donal Nolan) has published a new book entitled Contributory Negligence: Principles and Practice (OUP, 2018).

Despite the centrality of the contributory negligence doctrine in practice, very little is known about how it functions in reality. This volume provides legal practitioners with a ‘one-stop-shop’ where they can find clear and succinct exposition of the legal principles governing contributory negligence alongside an empirically informed analysis of the way the doctrine operates in various recurrent factual scenarios, based on cases decided between 1998 and 2017.

For each of the given recurring acts of contributory negligence, the average discount, the range of discounts, and the distribution of discounts are reported. These statistics are supplemented by way of illustrations drawn from the case law. Short summaries of typical cases for the relevant act of contributory negligence are given, along with summaries of cases that fall towards the higher and lower ends of the range of discounts.

Lord Reed, the Deputy President of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom, wrote in the foreword: ‘This concise book … will assist courts and practitioners in understanding this area of the law, and in applying a consistent approach when assessing in the most common types of case, the extent to which damages should be reduced for contributory negligence. It is greatly to be welcomed’.

The book is available here.