Professor Janet O’Sullivan sometimes characterises Tort law (in jest) as our society’s way of dealing with “people pranging into one another in their cars”. It is true that most real-life tort litigation concerns mundane, everyday injuries. Fortunately for Cambridge students, the Problem Questions we face in our Tort supervisions and exams are generally not mundane. On the contrary, Tort PQs posit extreme and far-fetched scenarios, encouraging us to apply and test legal principles in unfamiliar circumstances.

 

The single most important piece of advice I can give you for Tort Law (and indeed for all black-letter papers) is to keep on top of the lectures, whether you watch them in-person, or online, or prefer a combination of the two. In Tort Law, the lectures literally are the course. If you attempt to rely on textbooks instead, you will (a) miss material that is going to be examined or conceptualise it in ways that the Cambridge faculty doesn’t like, and (b) waste time trawling through material that is not going to be examined. I liked using Nick McBride’s Tort textbook to clarify the trickier concepts because his analysis is extraordinarily incisive and very up to date (make sure you use the most recent edition). With the greatest respect to Nick, I think that his textbook sometimes presents the law as it should be rather than the messy reality of how it is, so please do bear that in mind.

 

I think that it is impossible to read everything on the Tort supervision sheets, and I do not recommend that you try to do this; don’t let the supervision sheets become a distraction from the primary job of absorbing the lectures! What you must do is ensure that have researched and understood the relevant principles from any cases on the supervision sheets which were not covered in the lectures. In the academic year 2025–26, for instance, the line of cases addressing “wrongful birth” appeared on a supervision sheet, were not mentioned in lectures, and appeared in a PQ in the exam. You must also try to identify areas where the law is ambiguous or unsettled and – where it is – to read into the relevant cases to gain an understanding of the precedential landscape. Often, reading the headnote will suffice; sometimes, it will be necessary to delve into the case itself. The best lecturers are good at flagging areas of uncertainty in the law. Here are some areas where reading into cases (or at least headnotes) will be necessary:

• secondary psychiatric harm in negligence;

• the hash that the judiciary made of the tragic asbestos-related litigation;

• the tort of nuisance (last year Professor Jonathan Morgan was fantastic at giving the crucial paragraph references);

• A v National blood Authority and Wilkes v Depuy International in product liability.

 

What you are aiming to create as the outcome of your lectures and supervisions (relying on the lecture handouts as a template) is an easily navigable binder of authorities and principles which you can use to jog your memory in the exam. In the Tort exam, it seems that there are always five Problem Questions and three essays. A tried and tested method is to disregard the essays altogether and answer four PQs. Supervisors often advise that essays have a higher mark ceiling, but I think that this is bunk. Sticking with PQs has the great advantage of allowing candidates to focus wholly on black-letter law, and to ignore – for the purposes of the exam – the normative aspect of Tort. Of course, if you adopt the PQ-only strategy, you really must know the black-letter law on the syllabus inside-out. At most, you can exclude from your revision one of the more self-contained PQ topics like product liability or the tort of nuisance, but this is a risk because it has the effect of predetermining the four questions you must answer in the exam. The essay questions on the Tort exam are (a) hard and (b) difficult to predict and therefore to prepare for. The only constant is that there appears to be an essay question on some aspect of the tort of negligence every year.

I recommend that you peek at the past papers and the examiner’s reports in the Christmas Holidays, once you’ve got a feel for what the course is about. Revisit them when your’re revising, of course.

 

Read on for a preview of the substance of the Tort course!

 

In Michaelmas term, after a couple of introductory lectures and a quick waltz through the tort of battery, most of the lectures, and all but the first supervision, address the tort of negligence. Getting one’s head around the tort of negligence really is key to doing well in the Tort exam, because it has a way of sneaking into most of the PQs. The tort of negligence has multiple components – duty, breach, and causation – which are studied independently from one another. It is therefore impossible to see the full picture of the tort of negligence until the end of Michaelmas term; use the Christmas holidays as an opportunity to slot together in your mind the component parts of the tort. Remember not to take the appearance of negligence in a PQ as an automatic invitation to pontificate on whether it would be fair, just, and reasonable to impose a duty (see Caparo v Industries v Dickman and Robinson v Chief Constable of West Yorkshire). The course will introduce you to various established “duty categories” in respect of which the application of the Caparo test is now unnecessary, so make sure to consider whether the prospective duty is appropriately analysed through the prism of a specific line of case law. Nick McBride’s textbook has a useful table taxonomizing established and more uncertain “duty categories”.

 

Lent term should be easier than Michaelmas term, because the diet of lectures goes down from three to two per week. Each supervision in Lent term is nicely self-contained, addressing a discrete topic. In Lent, the course steers away from “people pranging into one another in their cars”, covering product liability and the tort of nuisance (a means of vindicating rights in land). Don’t forget the Supervision 9 topic, vicarious liability – the examiner’s reports often comment that candidates miss it altogether when answering PQs.

 

All that remains to say is that the author shall not be liable for any consequence arising from reliance upon the contents of this article.