Tefl: The Hillsborough Football Disaster and Claims for 'Nervous Shock' 251
The Hillsborough Football Disaster and Claims for 'Nervous Shock' PROFESSOR H TEFF, MA LLM PhD Department of Law, University of Durham, 50 North Bailey, Durham DH1 3ET ABSTRACT The article investigates the scope for 'nervous shock' claims consequent on negligently inflicted injury, in the light ofthe Hillsborough disaster. It analyses the existing case law, including the first instance and Court of Appeal judgments in litigation arising from the disaster (for the House of Lords judgment, see Addendum). Its main purpose is to show that several of the arguments and conclusions in these judgments are driven by considerations of policy rather than principle, and primarily by a concern to prevent the 'floodgates of litigation' from opening. It is submitted that greater attention to medical perspectives on psychiatric illness would reveal that this concern is overstated and that a more principled approach would not have the adverse consequences predicted.
As the recent litigation arising from the Hillsborough football disaster well illustrates, for many years the courts have experienced difficulty with claims for what, in law, has traditionally, if inaccurately, been termed 'nervous shock'. The expression is used to describe psychiatric damage in the form of a recognized mental illness or disorder, an acknowledged basis oftort liability. By contrast, compensation for non-pathological grief or distress is only available as an element of a claim for physical injury. Most of the problems have concerned plaintiffs who claimed to have suffered 'nervous shock' as a foreseeable consequence of an injury negligently inflicted by the defendant on someone else - the primary victim. But the difficulties have been exaggerated. They largely stem from a judicial failure to distinguish clearly between primary and secondary responses to traumatic stimuli and their respective causes. Fearful that straightforward application of orthodox negligence principles would lead to a massive increase in the number of claims, the courts, by the use of various tech-
niques, have artificially and unnecessarily restricted the scope of such actions. In the nineteenth century, reflecting judicial distrust of psychiatry and fear of fraudulent claims, it was a prerequisite of recovery for shock that the plaintiff had actually suffered physical injury or impact (Victorian Railways Commissioners v. Coultas (1888». By a subsequent modification, a plaintiff put in reasonable fear of physical injury successfully sued for shock tDulieu v. White (1901». Even when lack offear for oneself was no longer seen as a bar to recovery, and when the case law began to focus less on the zone of physical danger and more on that of emotional shock, judges remained reluctant to accept that emotional injury was reasonably foreseeable when the plaintiff was not in close physical proximity to the accident (King v. Phillips (1953». In fact, except within narrowly defined limits, they were loath to concede that the sight or apprehension of someone else's injury might foreseeably cause nervous shock. Alarmed by the prospect of the courts being inundated with claims from distant relatives, friends or bystanders at an accident, they adopted an essentially mechanical approach, based on closeness of family relationship. As appears from the decided cases, (cp. Chadwick v. British Railways Board (1967), plaintiff a rescuer) normally only a parent or spouse of the primary accident victim has been able to recover. Others not so closely related, or indeed unrelated, were deemed to be of sufficient fortitude for psychiatric injury not to be reasonably foreseeable; though some judicial dicta did envisage recovery by 'near' or 'close' relatives.
252 Mad. Sci. Law (1992) Vol. 32, NO.3
Additional devices restricting the range of potential liability have been the insistence that claimants should have experienced the shock through their own unaided senses, rather than by being informed (Hambrook v. Stokes Bros [1925]), and that their proximity to the accident should have been close in time as well as in space. In negligence generally, a duty of care is owed to people only if it is reasonably foreseeable that they are at risk of injury. It is therefore implicit in the above limitations that proximity to the scene of an accident, and direct perception of it, are either necessary indicators of foreseeable psychiatric damage, or policy-based requirements specific to 'nervous shock'. The suspicion that they are the latter is strengthened by medical understanding of emotional responses to shock (Leibson, 1977). The initial, primary reaction to witnessing an accident is typically short-lived and rarely results in psychiatric illness, at least of any prolonged duration. Traumatic neuroses, in the form of secondary responses, though reasonably foreseeable in some circumstances, are relatively uncommon and normally relate strongly to the actual depth of the relationship between plaintiff and primary victim. This would suggest that judicial fears about the floodgates opening are misplaced. They reflect a tension between the demands of legal principle and the supposed dictates of pragmatism which has been a persistent theme in the modern law of negligence. In the context of nervous shock, it is a theme well illustrated in the leading modern case of McLoughlin v. O'Brian (1983). Mr McLoughlin and three of his children were negligently injured in a road accident. An hour or so later, his wife was informed by telephone and taken to the hospital, where, after having being told that her youngest daughter had died, she saw the other seriously injured members of her family still covered in blood, dirt and oil. On the assumption that she consequently suffered severe shock, organic depression and a change of personality, the House of Lords held that she was entitled to recover damages from the negligent driver. Apart from its significance in treating ex.perience of the 'immediate aftermath' as equivalent to presence at the accident, the
precise basis of the decision is elusive (Teff, 1983). Divergent views were expressed on whether, in 'nervous shock' cases, the principle of reasonable foreseeability of harm, 'untrammelled by spatial, physical, or temporal limits' (Mc Loughlin v. O'Brian, per Lord Scarman), was the only legitimate criterion ofliability, or whether considerations of policy - specifically the closeness of the tie between plaintiff and victim, proximity to the accident (or aftermath) and direct perception of it - should playa key role in determining, and typically restricting, liability. The former view seems to have had marginally more support in the judgment itself, and several later decisions have also been based on reasonable foreseeability (e.g. Jaensch v. Coffey (1984), Ravenscroft v. Rederiaktiebelaget Transatlantic, (1991». But it would be a mistake to expect too great a difference in outcome between the two approaches. In practice there is ample evidence in the law of negligence, and, as indicated, particularly in nervous shock cases, of policy factors helping to shape the realms of the 'foreseeable'. This, then, provides the background to Hillsborough, where 95 spectators died and over 400 required hospital treatment as a result of negligent policing of an FA Cup semi-final. In Alcock v. Chief Constable of South Yorkshire (1991), 16 plaintiffs, who were either relatives or friends of spectators, sought to establish a right of action for nervous shock, most commonly in the form of post-traumatic stress disorder. Several of them were in the stadium as events unfolded; one was watching on television just outside. Some claimants saw live television broadcasts; others, who were told about the disaster or heard radio reports only, saw recorded television pictures later on. The case raised two issues touched on in McLoughlin v. O'Brian, but not relevant to the decision, namely the scope for recovery where the plaintiff was neither a parent nor spouse of the primary victim, and where the mode of communication was other than through the plaintiffs own unaided senses. In McLoughlin v. O'Brian, Lord Wilberforce noted that: 'Whether some equivalent of sight or hearing, e.g. through simultaneous television, would suffice may have to be considered.'
Tefl: The Hillsborough Football Disaster and Claims for 'Nervous Shock' 253
As regards categories of claimants his view was that the restriction to parent or spouse was justifiable, but that on very careful scrutiny others might be admitted: 'The closer the tie (not merely in relationship but in care) the greater the claim for consideration.'
In Alcock, at first instance it was held that psychiatric illness was, in principle, a reasonably foreseeable consequence for claimants who had seen live television broadcasts but not for those who had been told of the disaster or had heard about it on the radio and only later saw recorded television pictures. The class of normally foreseeable plaintiffs was extended to include siblings, but no other categories beyond parent or spouse. On the facts, this ruled out recovery for a grandfather, uncles, a fiancee, a brother-in-law and a friend. In the words of the judge: 'Once [the line] is extended to include brother and sister, I consider it has reached the margin of what the process of logical progression would allow.'
The other relationships ... 'are not so immediate, in my view, as to make it reasonably foreseeable to a defendant that psychiatric illness, rather than grief and sorrow, would follow death or damage to the loved one.'
It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that this judgment was a perfect illustration of the tendency for policy factors to shape the scope of the foreseeable. From a medical perspective it seems strange, to say the least, that a fiancee or grandfather or arguably any of the classes mentioned, should be categorically excluded. Equally, the distinction between live television and radio or recorded television is of doubtful scientific validity. It is significant that shortly before the Court of Appeal judgment in the Hillsborough case, two other first instance decisions (Hevican v. Ruane, (199 1); Raoenscroft v . Rederiaktiebelaget Transatlantic, (1991», founded squarely on the principle of reasonable foreseeability, permitted recovery by parents who had suffered clinical depression on being told, after the event, of the negligently caused deaths of their children. Moreover, in these
cases substantial reliance was placed on expert medical evidence emphasizing the central role played by the actual closeness of the relationship; the relative unimportance of the mode of communication in the case of 'a loved one's' death, and the undoubted foreseeability of such consequences, despite their rarity in people of ordinary fortitude. The Hillsborough case then went to the Court of Appeal (Jones v. Wright [1991]). There, it was held that normally only a parent or spouse can recover damages, but exceptionally the categories could include other relatives (or a friend, according to one judge), if, on close scrutiny, the actual relationship between plaintiff and victim is shown to be one of loving care and affection similar to that of a normal parent or spouse. Conversely, the presumption of love and affection in the case of a parent or spouse is open to rebuttal on the facts. As for the mode of communication, nothing short of direct, unaided perception would do. Even live television would not suffice, at least in so far as it could not be expected to communicate more than the fact of the accident or disaster, as mediated by those responsible for the broadcast. In the result, of the nine initially successful plaintiffs against whom the defendant appealed, eight lost in the Court of Appeal because they had seen the events on live television. The other plaintiff also lost because, though he was at the match where both of his brothers died, no evidence had been advanced as to the closeness of the tie. It is submitted that the Court of Appeal's attention to the actual nature of the relationship between plaintiff and victim is to be welcomed, but that (partly for this very reason), its narrow approach to the issue of mode of communication is unfortunate. This seems especially so where the mode of communication forms only part of a foreseeable traumatic sequence of events. One father, who knew his son was at the match and believed that he would be in the 'danger zone', saw the live television broadcast. He made telephone inquiries, in vain, until 4am the following morning, then went to look for his son at the hospital to no avail and finally identified his body at the mortuary on police information. His claim was distinguished by the
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Court from Mrs McLaughlin's on the basis that, in law, nervous shock connotes 'a reaction to an immediate and horrifying impact' rather than 'an accumulation of more gradual assaults'. It was further suggested in the Court of Appeal that Hevican and Ravenscroft purpor~ to extend the ambit of nervous shock claims beyond permissible limits. Yet, it is interesting that Lord Justice Nolan, the only member of the Court who explicitly addressed the medical implications of Hillsborough in his judgment, conceded that in England: 'the floodgates appear to have remained shut in spite of the increasing breadth of the court's approach to the question of liability' .
He further stated that the gates ... 'would still remain shut if the claims of all the plaintiffs in the present case were upheld'.
This surely is the nub of the matter. The flight from the logic of reasonable foreseeabil.ity and from the insights afforded by 'progressive awareness of mental illness' is largely attributable to a fear of the floodgates which in the particular context is overstated, if not ~s conceived. It is also unfortunate for the plaintiffs that their claims have arisen at the very time when the law of negligence generally has been witnessing a marked retreat from a broadly-based conception of reasonable foreseeability, in favour of a more restrictive, narrowly conceived emphasis on proximity of relationship between plaintiff and defendant. Leave has been granted for an appeal to the House of Lords (see Addendum below).
REFERENCES Alcock v. Chief Constable of South Yorkshire Police [1991] 2 W.L.R. 814
Chadwick v. British Railways Board [1967] 1 WL.R. 912. Dulieu v. White [1901] 2 K.B. 669. Hamhrook v. Stokes [1925] 1 K.B. 141. Hevican v.Ruane [1991] 3 All E.R. 65. Jaensch v. Coffey (1984) 54 A.L.R. 417. Jones v. Wright [1991] 3 All E.R. 88. King v.Phillips [1953] 1 Q.B. 429. Leibson D. J. (1977) Recovery of damages for emotional distress caused by physical injury to another. J. Family L. 163-211. McLoughlin v. O'Brian [1983] AC. 410. Raoenscroft v. Rederiaktieb¢laget Transatlantic [1991] 3 All E.R. 73. Teff H. (1983) Liability for negligently inflicted nervous shock. Law Quarterly Review 100-1. Victorian Railways Commissioners v, Coultas [1888] 13 App, Cas. 222. ADDENDUM
The House of Lords has dismissed all of the appeals (Alcock v . Chief Constable of South Yorkshjre Police (1992) 1 AC. 310). Though simultaneous televisionwas not categorically ruled out as a possible basis ofliability, viewing live television which did not depict the suffering of recognisable individuals was distinguished from actual sight or hearing of the event. Such scenes were not deemed to give rise to 'shock' in the sense of a sudden assault on the nervous system, as distinct from anxiety. Nor was shock deemed reasonably foreseeable by a defendant aware of the broadcasting code precluding coverage of recognisable individuals. The appellants who were present at the ground also failed. Sufficient proximity of relationship required proof of close ties of love and affection in fact, which could be (rebuttably) presumed only where the claimant was a spouse or parent.
The Hillsborough Football Disaster and Claims for 'Nervous Shock' PROFESSOR H TEFF, MA LLM PhD Department of Law, University of Durham, 50 North Bailey, Durham DH1 3ET ABSTRACT The article investigates the scope for 'nervous shock' claims consequent on negligently inflicted injury, in the light ofthe Hillsborough disaster. It analyses the existing case law, including the first instance and Court of Appeal judgments in litigation arising from the disaster (for the House of Lords judgment, see Addendum). Its main purpose is to show that several of the arguments and conclusions in these judgments are driven by considerations of policy rather than principle, and primarily by a concern to prevent the 'floodgates of litigation' from opening. It is submitted that greater attention to medical perspectives on psychiatric illness would reveal that this concern is overstated and that a more principled approach would not have the adverse consequences predicted.
As the recent litigation arising from the Hillsborough football disaster well illustrates, for many years the courts have experienced difficulty with claims for what, in law, has traditionally, if inaccurately, been termed 'nervous shock'. The expression is used to describe psychiatric damage in the form of a recognized mental illness or disorder, an acknowledged basis oftort liability. By contrast, compensation for non-pathological grief or distress is only available as an element of a claim for physical injury. Most of the problems have concerned plaintiffs who claimed to have suffered 'nervous shock' as a foreseeable consequence of an injury negligently inflicted by the defendant on someone else - the primary victim. But the difficulties have been exaggerated. They largely stem from a judicial failure to distinguish clearly between primary and secondary responses to traumatic stimuli and their respective causes. Fearful that straightforward application of orthodox negligence principles would lead to a massive increase in the number of claims, the courts, by the use of various tech-
niques, have artificially and unnecessarily restricted the scope of such actions. In the nineteenth century, reflecting judicial distrust of psychiatry and fear of fraudulent claims, it was a prerequisite of recovery for shock that the plaintiff had actually suffered physical injury or impact (Victorian Railways Commissioners v. Coultas (1888». By a subsequent modification, a plaintiff put in reasonable fear of physical injury successfully sued for shock tDulieu v. White (1901». Even when lack offear for oneself was no longer seen as a bar to recovery, and when the case law began to focus less on the zone of physical danger and more on that of emotional shock, judges remained reluctant to accept that emotional injury was reasonably foreseeable when the plaintiff was not in close physical proximity to the accident (King v. Phillips (1953». In fact, except within narrowly defined limits, they were loath to concede that the sight or apprehension of someone else's injury might foreseeably cause nervous shock. Alarmed by the prospect of the courts being inundated with claims from distant relatives, friends or bystanders at an accident, they adopted an essentially mechanical approach, based on closeness of family relationship. As appears from the decided cases, (cp. Chadwick v. British Railways Board (1967), plaintiff a rescuer) normally only a parent or spouse of the primary accident victim has been able to recover. Others not so closely related, or indeed unrelated, were deemed to be of sufficient fortitude for psychiatric injury not to be reasonably foreseeable; though some judicial dicta did envisage recovery by 'near' or 'close' relatives.
252 Mad. Sci. Law (1992) Vol. 32, NO.3
Additional devices restricting the range of potential liability have been the insistence that claimants should have experienced the shock through their own unaided senses, rather than by being informed (Hambrook v. Stokes Bros [1925]), and that their proximity to the accident should have been close in time as well as in space. In negligence generally, a duty of care is owed to people only if it is reasonably foreseeable that they are at risk of injury. It is therefore implicit in the above limitations that proximity to the scene of an accident, and direct perception of it, are either necessary indicators of foreseeable psychiatric damage, or policy-based requirements specific to 'nervous shock'. The suspicion that they are the latter is strengthened by medical understanding of emotional responses to shock (Leibson, 1977). The initial, primary reaction to witnessing an accident is typically short-lived and rarely results in psychiatric illness, at least of any prolonged duration. Traumatic neuroses, in the form of secondary responses, though reasonably foreseeable in some circumstances, are relatively uncommon and normally relate strongly to the actual depth of the relationship between plaintiff and primary victim. This would suggest that judicial fears about the floodgates opening are misplaced. They reflect a tension between the demands of legal principle and the supposed dictates of pragmatism which has been a persistent theme in the modern law of negligence. In the context of nervous shock, it is a theme well illustrated in the leading modern case of McLoughlin v. O'Brian (1983). Mr McLoughlin and three of his children were negligently injured in a road accident. An hour or so later, his wife was informed by telephone and taken to the hospital, where, after having being told that her youngest daughter had died, she saw the other seriously injured members of her family still covered in blood, dirt and oil. On the assumption that she consequently suffered severe shock, organic depression and a change of personality, the House of Lords held that she was entitled to recover damages from the negligent driver. Apart from its significance in treating ex.perience of the 'immediate aftermath' as equivalent to presence at the accident, the
precise basis of the decision is elusive (Teff, 1983). Divergent views were expressed on whether, in 'nervous shock' cases, the principle of reasonable foreseeability of harm, 'untrammelled by spatial, physical, or temporal limits' (Mc Loughlin v. O'Brian, per Lord Scarman), was the only legitimate criterion ofliability, or whether considerations of policy - specifically the closeness of the tie between plaintiff and victim, proximity to the accident (or aftermath) and direct perception of it - should playa key role in determining, and typically restricting, liability. The former view seems to have had marginally more support in the judgment itself, and several later decisions have also been based on reasonable foreseeability (e.g. Jaensch v. Coffey (1984), Ravenscroft v. Rederiaktiebelaget Transatlantic, (1991». But it would be a mistake to expect too great a difference in outcome between the two approaches. In practice there is ample evidence in the law of negligence, and, as indicated, particularly in nervous shock cases, of policy factors helping to shape the realms of the 'foreseeable'. This, then, provides the background to Hillsborough, where 95 spectators died and over 400 required hospital treatment as a result of negligent policing of an FA Cup semi-final. In Alcock v. Chief Constable of South Yorkshire (1991), 16 plaintiffs, who were either relatives or friends of spectators, sought to establish a right of action for nervous shock, most commonly in the form of post-traumatic stress disorder. Several of them were in the stadium as events unfolded; one was watching on television just outside. Some claimants saw live television broadcasts; others, who were told about the disaster or heard radio reports only, saw recorded television pictures later on. The case raised two issues touched on in McLoughlin v. O'Brian, but not relevant to the decision, namely the scope for recovery where the plaintiff was neither a parent nor spouse of the primary victim, and where the mode of communication was other than through the plaintiffs own unaided senses. In McLoughlin v. O'Brian, Lord Wilberforce noted that: 'Whether some equivalent of sight or hearing, e.g. through simultaneous television, would suffice may have to be considered.'
Tefl: The Hillsborough Football Disaster and Claims for 'Nervous Shock' 253
As regards categories of claimants his view was that the restriction to parent or spouse was justifiable, but that on very careful scrutiny others might be admitted: 'The closer the tie (not merely in relationship but in care) the greater the claim for consideration.'
In Alcock, at first instance it was held that psychiatric illness was, in principle, a reasonably foreseeable consequence for claimants who had seen live television broadcasts but not for those who had been told of the disaster or had heard about it on the radio and only later saw recorded television pictures. The class of normally foreseeable plaintiffs was extended to include siblings, but no other categories beyond parent or spouse. On the facts, this ruled out recovery for a grandfather, uncles, a fiancee, a brother-in-law and a friend. In the words of the judge: 'Once [the line] is extended to include brother and sister, I consider it has reached the margin of what the process of logical progression would allow.'
The other relationships ... 'are not so immediate, in my view, as to make it reasonably foreseeable to a defendant that psychiatric illness, rather than grief and sorrow, would follow death or damage to the loved one.'
It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that this judgment was a perfect illustration of the tendency for policy factors to shape the scope of the foreseeable. From a medical perspective it seems strange, to say the least, that a fiancee or grandfather or arguably any of the classes mentioned, should be categorically excluded. Equally, the distinction between live television and radio or recorded television is of doubtful scientific validity. It is significant that shortly before the Court of Appeal judgment in the Hillsborough case, two other first instance decisions (Hevican v. Ruane, (199 1); Raoenscroft v . Rederiaktiebelaget Transatlantic, (1991», founded squarely on the principle of reasonable foreseeability, permitted recovery by parents who had suffered clinical depression on being told, after the event, of the negligently caused deaths of their children. Moreover, in these
cases substantial reliance was placed on expert medical evidence emphasizing the central role played by the actual closeness of the relationship; the relative unimportance of the mode of communication in the case of 'a loved one's' death, and the undoubted foreseeability of such consequences, despite their rarity in people of ordinary fortitude. The Hillsborough case then went to the Court of Appeal (Jones v. Wright [1991]). There, it was held that normally only a parent or spouse can recover damages, but exceptionally the categories could include other relatives (or a friend, according to one judge), if, on close scrutiny, the actual relationship between plaintiff and victim is shown to be one of loving care and affection similar to that of a normal parent or spouse. Conversely, the presumption of love and affection in the case of a parent or spouse is open to rebuttal on the facts. As for the mode of communication, nothing short of direct, unaided perception would do. Even live television would not suffice, at least in so far as it could not be expected to communicate more than the fact of the accident or disaster, as mediated by those responsible for the broadcast. In the result, of the nine initially successful plaintiffs against whom the defendant appealed, eight lost in the Court of Appeal because they had seen the events on live television. The other plaintiff also lost because, though he was at the match where both of his brothers died, no evidence had been advanced as to the closeness of the tie. It is submitted that the Court of Appeal's attention to the actual nature of the relationship between plaintiff and victim is to be welcomed, but that (partly for this very reason), its narrow approach to the issue of mode of communication is unfortunate. This seems especially so where the mode of communication forms only part of a foreseeable traumatic sequence of events. One father, who knew his son was at the match and believed that he would be in the 'danger zone', saw the live television broadcast. He made telephone inquiries, in vain, until 4am the following morning, then went to look for his son at the hospital to no avail and finally identified his body at the mortuary on police information. His claim was distinguished by the
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Court from Mrs McLaughlin's on the basis that, in law, nervous shock connotes 'a reaction to an immediate and horrifying impact' rather than 'an accumulation of more gradual assaults'. It was further suggested in the Court of Appeal that Hevican and Ravenscroft purpor~ to extend the ambit of nervous shock claims beyond permissible limits. Yet, it is interesting that Lord Justice Nolan, the only member of the Court who explicitly addressed the medical implications of Hillsborough in his judgment, conceded that in England: 'the floodgates appear to have remained shut in spite of the increasing breadth of the court's approach to the question of liability' .
He further stated that the gates ... 'would still remain shut if the claims of all the plaintiffs in the present case were upheld'.
This surely is the nub of the matter. The flight from the logic of reasonable foreseeabil.ity and from the insights afforded by 'progressive awareness of mental illness' is largely attributable to a fear of the floodgates which in the particular context is overstated, if not ~s conceived. It is also unfortunate for the plaintiffs that their claims have arisen at the very time when the law of negligence generally has been witnessing a marked retreat from a broadly-based conception of reasonable foreseeability, in favour of a more restrictive, narrowly conceived emphasis on proximity of relationship between plaintiff and defendant. Leave has been granted for an appeal to the House of Lords (see Addendum below).
REFERENCES Alcock v. Chief Constable of South Yorkshire Police [1991] 2 W.L.R. 814
Chadwick v. British Railways Board [1967] 1 WL.R. 912. Dulieu v. White [1901] 2 K.B. 669. Hamhrook v. Stokes [1925] 1 K.B. 141. Hevican v.Ruane [1991] 3 All E.R. 65. Jaensch v. Coffey (1984) 54 A.L.R. 417. Jones v. Wright [1991] 3 All E.R. 88. King v.Phillips [1953] 1 Q.B. 429. Leibson D. J. (1977) Recovery of damages for emotional distress caused by physical injury to another. J. Family L. 163-211. McLoughlin v. O'Brian [1983] AC. 410. Raoenscroft v. Rederiaktieb¢laget Transatlantic [1991] 3 All E.R. 73. Teff H. (1983) Liability for negligently inflicted nervous shock. Law Quarterly Review 100-1. Victorian Railways Commissioners v, Coultas [1888] 13 App, Cas. 222. ADDENDUM
The House of Lords has dismissed all of the appeals (Alcock v . Chief Constable of South Yorkshjre Police (1992) 1 AC. 310). Though simultaneous televisionwas not categorically ruled out as a possible basis ofliability, viewing live television which did not depict the suffering of recognisable individuals was distinguished from actual sight or hearing of the event. Such scenes were not deemed to give rise to 'shock' in the sense of a sudden assault on the nervous system, as distinct from anxiety. Nor was shock deemed reasonably foreseeable by a defendant aware of the broadcasting code precluding coverage of recognisable individuals. The appellants who were present at the ground also failed. Sufficient proximity of relationship required proof of close ties of love and affection in fact, which could be (rebuttably) presumed only where the claimant was a spouse or parent.
