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In recent times, professional negligence has taken centre stage in the news. The inability of auditors to uncover fraud in their clients’ financial records has become a topic of intense debate among industry professionals and regulators, with no clear consensus reached thus far. This paper employs a qualitative research approach to delve into the consequences of professional negligence and why auditors will continue to face the consequences of their failure to detect fraud in their clients’ financial records. Our research findings indicate that auditors will continue to bear the brunt of professional negligence until there is a fundamental shift in their mandate, prompting them to assume a more proactive role in detecting fraud within financial statements. The repercussions of professional negligence extend beyond financial losses, encompassing intangible costs that severely tarnish the reputation of the auditing profession.

Throughout its history, tort law has played a pivotal role in the continuous adaptation of the legal system to social and economic transformations amid periods of technological upheaval. Its adaptive function was often carried out through the doctrine of “public callings” – a common law category widely employed by courts to define the rights and duties of businesses operating in important service industries. In particular, this doctrine served to hold businesses liable for harms caused by the incompetent or insufficiently diligent performance of the services they undertook to provide. Over time, the public callings doctrine evolved into the more familiar frameworks of common carrier and public utility laws, which were increasingly employed by legislatures and regulators to advance economic regulation. As the onus of regulation thus shifted to other branches of government, tort law receded, largely abandoning the adaptive regulatory function it had historically performed. This Article draws on the rich history of tort-based regulation of service industries through the public-callings doctrine to propose a new conceptual regulatory framework for the digital space – one recognizing the systemic importance of two doctrinal offshoots of the public-callings doctrine: the tort of professional negligence, and complementary doctrines for invalidating exculpatory clauses limiting liability for negligent services on public policy grounds. Together, these doctrines establish a framework, which enables tort law to ensure that skill-, knowledge-, and expertise-based services – particularly those essential for participation in social and economic life – are delivered with reasonable proficiency in accordance with industry norms. These doctrines provide a basis for flexible and nuanced imposition of duties in emerging digital industries, and, as the Article contends, are particularly applicable to prominent digital platforms – arguably, the “public callings” of our era. Building on this analysis, the Article introduces the novel concept of “digital malpractice,” explores its potential applications across key functions performed by digital platforms, and calls for its broader adoption as a normatively grounded, adjudication-based regulatory framework for the modern digital environment.

We report the results of four experiments investigating the relationship between (1) the quality of an audit, (2) jurors' assessments of the standard of prudent care (SOC) against which audit quality is compared, and (3) jurors' negligence verdicts. Experiment 1 operationalizes audit quality by varying the sample size used in audit testing, and provides evidence that jurors anchor their assessment of SOC on audit quality, producing a \"competitive mediation\" in which audit quality reduces the potential for a negligence verdict directly, but increases that potential indirectly by increasing SOC. Experiment 2 generalizes this finding to a setting that operationalizes audit quality by varying the size of adjustment the auditor required. Experiments 3 and 4 extend these results to a setting in which SOC is elicited after jurors make negligence verdicts. Overall, these experiments provide insight into the role of SOC in constraining and justifying negligence verdicts.

A pharmacist fills a prescription for birth control pills with prenatal vitamins. An in vitro lab loses a cancer survivor's eggs. A fertility clinic exposes embryos to mad cow disease. A sperm bank switches a selected sample with one from a donor of a different race. An obstetrician predicts that a healthy fetus will be born with a debilitating condition. These errors go virtually unchecked in a profession that operates free of meaningful regulation. Private remedies meanwhile treat reproductive negligence more as trifle than tragedy. Courts do not deny that specialists are to blame for botching vasectomies or misimplanting embryos. But in the absence of property loss or physical injury, existing law provides little basis to recognize disrupted family planning as a harm worthy of protection. This Essay sets forth a novel framework of reproductive wrongs. It distinguishes misconduct that (1) imposes unwanted pregnancy or parenthood, (2) deprives wanted pregnancy or parenthood, and (3) confounds efforts to have or avoid a child born with particular traits. It also introduces a right to recover when reproductive professionals perpetrate these wrongs. This new cause of action would measure the injuries of imposed, deprived, and confounded procreation as a function of their practical consequences for victims' lives and the probability that wrongdoing was responsible for having caused those harms. Damages would accordingly be reduced, for example, by the plausible role of user error in cases of defective condoms, by preexisting infertility in cases of dropped embryos, and by genetic uncertainties in cases of prenatal misdiagnosis.

We conduct an experiment with 749 mock jurors to examine whether juries evaluate auditors differently under precise versus imprecise standards when the client reporting is held constant. We find that the impact of standard precision on jury verdicts depends on the aggressiveness of the audit client's financial reports and on the industry reporting norm. When the client's reporting is more aggressive and violates the precise standard, juries return fewer verdicts against auditors under the imprecise standard, especially when the reporting complies with the industry norm. When the client's reporting is less aggressive and complies with the precise standard, juries return more verdicts against auditors under the imprecise standard, but only when the client's reporting is more aggressive than the industry norm. Compliance with industry reporting norms appears to provide auditors with safe harbor protection from negligence verdicts when accounting standards are imprecise.

This contribution distinguishes two kinds of responsibility: the basic (or 'metaphysical') kind that we all inescapably have as functioning human beings; and the assignable (or 'political') kind that connects each of us with some particular tasks, and not with others. Having explored some differences between the two, and in particular the role of law's authority in connection with each, the discussion turns to the negligence standard, especially but not only as it figures in tort law. Recently, several philosophers have attempted to find a role for the negligence standard in the metaphysics of basic responsibility. This contribution resists that development and stands up for the traditional lawyer's view that the negligence standard belongs to the pliable politics of assignable responsibility. Basic responsibility, it is argued, is fundamentally strict.

This paper offers an account of concurrent liability, and in particular the existence of, and interaction between, concurrent contractual and non-contractual duties. It argues for five essential propositions: (1) a defendant can owe simultaneous private law duties towards a claimant, the content of which overlaps in whole or in part; (2) cases of concurrent liability in contract and negligence involve independent duties, which are concurrent but not coextensive; (3) the doctrine of concurrent liability is conceptually distinct from the rule that the claimant must elect between inconsistent remedies; (4) if the defendant commits a wrong in breach of more than one duty, the claimant has a prima facie choice to sue for any of those breaches; and (5) the content of one any duty might affect the content of the other. The last of these principles, it is argued, provide an explanation for the recent decisions in Wellesley Partners v Withers and AIB v Mark Redler.

In this article we report the results of an empirical study of 368 first instance decisions on the contributory negligence doctrine handed down in England and Wales between 2000 and 2014. The two central questions at which we looked were: how often a defendant's plea of contributory negligence was successful; and by how much a claimant's damages were reduced when a finding of contributory negligence was made. We also considered the extent to which the answers to these questions depended on the following variables: the claimant's age; the claimant's gender; the type of damage suffered by the claimant; the contextual setting of the claim; and the year of the decision. Our study uncovered several important truths about the contributory negligence doctrine hidden in this mass of case law, some of which cast significant doubt on the accuracy of widely held views about the doctrine's operation.

Cases of negligence in orthodontics are not as frequent as in other dental or medical specialties. However, sometimes we come across a case of negligence that cannot be ignored. Here, we present a very uncommon finding of a molar tube embedded in the labial vestibule, between mandibular central and lateral incisors, for more than a month. The uniqueness of this finding is that a molar tube, as the name suggests, is supposed to be bonded on molars and if it gets dislodged due to any reason, it should have been embedded near the respective molar. With this dilemma in mind, this case offers many things to learn from errors.

Rediscovering the Law of Negligence offers a systematic and theoretical exploration of the law of negligence. Its aim is to re-establish the notion that thinking about the law ought to and can proceed on the basis of principle. As such, it is opposed to the prevalent modern view that the various aspects of the law are and must be based on individual policy decisions and that the task of the judge or commentator is to shape the law in terms of the relevant policies as she sees them. The book, then, is an attempt to re-establish the law of negligence as a body of law rather than as a branch of politics. The book argues that the law of negligence is best understood in terms of a relatively small set of principles enunciated in a small number of leading cases. It further argues that these principles are themselves best seen in terms of an aspect of morality called corrective justice which, when applied to the most important aspects of the law of negligence reveals that the law – even as it now exists – possesses a far greater degree of conceptual unity than is commonly thought. Using this method the author is able to examine familiar aspects of the law of negligence such as the standard of care; the duty of care; remoteness; misfeasance; economic loss; negligent misrepresentation; the liability of public bodies; wrongful conception; nervous shock; the defences of contributory negligence, voluntary assumption of risk, and illegality; causation; and issues concerning proof, to show that when the principles are applied and the idea of corrective justice is properly understood then the law appears both systematic and conceptually satisfactory. The upshot is a rediscovery of the law of negligence.