Craig Purshouse on Rethinking negligence liability for ‘pure psychiatric damage’: an analogy with assault (Legal Studies)

"Rethinking negligence liability for ‘pure psychiatric damage’: an analogy with assault"
Craig Purshouse
Legal Studies
Published online: July 2026

Abstract: Orthodox accounts of negligence liability for ‘pure psychiatric damage’ view it as protecting the claimants’ interest in their psychiatric health and often attack English law’s restrictive duty of care rules for inadequately safeguarding this right. This paper challenges this widespread consensus by presenting and evaluating an alternative explanatory rationale. Drawing an analogy between the ‘paradigm case’ of primary victims and the tort of assault, the crux of the argument is that the interest protected in ‘accident’ cases is in avoiding anticipated immediate physical violence but the law sometimes extends the protection of this right to secondary victims in order to preserve the law’s legitimacy. From this perspective, several intractable doctrinal problems that have long troubled adherents to the orthodox view become explicable.