TKP Ex post negligence SHORT 19/08/2013 10:19:00 DRAFT Injuries from unforeseeable risks which advance medical knowledge – a restitution-based justification for strict liability Tsachi Keren-Paz Professor of Private Law, Keele University.
[email protected]. For helpful comments on a previous draft I would like to thank John Danaher, Ariel Porat and Duncan Sheehan. 1 TKP Ex post negligence SHORT 19/08/2013 10:19:00 DRAFT Introduction Medical treatments involve risks; sometimes the risks are unforeseeable at the time of treatment.1 When a patient is injured from the materialisation of unforeseeable risk, traditional tort principles require one of two unhappy results: Either the patient who was injured from what is deemed to be, albeit only with hindsight, suboptimal, would not be compensated, or the physician would be found liable, based on an incorrect finding of the risk as foreseeable, with the result that the physician is unjustly labelled as negligent. I examine in this paper a third possibility which will impose strict liability on the physician under a restitutionary theory: involuntarily, the patient has advanced knowledge which will prevent harm to future patients. Therefore, it is fair to compensate the patient for the costs she incurred by providing this benefit. Consider the following example. Ravid, a 5 year old girl, is being treated by a dentist who uses a non-aspirating syringe (NAS) for a local anaesthetic to her gum. Shortly after neurological symptoms appeared and eventually, permanent neurological impairment remained. A use of aspirating syringe (AS) would have indicated the penetration of the material to the artery, thereby preventing the injection into the bloodstream.