Blackstone's Tower: The English Law School - College of Social ...

The Law Library
seems to be almost as broad and as random as the contents of
a newspaper; there is, of course, some overlap, but a significant
difference of emphasis. It would be interesting to contrast the picture
and treatment of "public life" in the law reports and the news
media, using modern methods of analysing and interpreting the
content and form of the various kinds of publication. 28 One might
conclude that they represent rather different kinds of distorting
lenses on our social life.
Here we have to be content with a few quick impressions. By
chance, perhaps the most important case from a legal point of view
that is reported in this volume relates to a spectacular national tragedy.
Its presence is signalled rather cryptically (and not entirely
accurately) in the Digest as follows:
DAMAGES—Personal injury—Nervous shock—Disaster at football
stadium—Persons with relatives at stadium seeing live broadcast
of events
Alcock v Chief Constable of South Yorkshire Police HL 907
The case dealt with one aspect of the Hillsborough Stadium disaster
in which 95 spectators were crushed to death and 400 were
injured during the semi-final of the F.A. Cup on 15 April 1989.
This report dealt with the culmination in the House of Lords of
proceedings by 15 plaintiffs who had been in a different part of
the stadium or who had heard about the disaster on television or
radio and as a result had suffered nervous shock which caused
psychiatric illness because they believed that a close relative or
fiance(e) might have been one of the victims. The South Yorkshire
Police had admitted liability in negligence to those who had suffered
physical injury in the crowd, but denied that they owed a
duty of care in negligence to onlookers (whether at the ground or
through the media) who had suffered nervous shock resulting in
illness. The plaintiffs claimed that the defendants were liable if the
resulting illness was reasonably foreseeable. The House of Lords
unanimously rejected all of the plaintiffs' appeals.
From a social point of view the report is of interest because it
focuses a very bright light on just one aspect of a tragic event that
not only affected the victims, their families and the whole country,
but also had considerable repercussions on such matters as the
design of football stadiums and police practices of crowd control. 29
From a legal point of view Alcock is a leading case because it put
in issue a variety of issues about the duty of care in negligence that
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