Law According To A King

An NDA, or non-disclosure agreement, is a contract in which parties agree not to disclose information covered by the agreement. These are often not enshrined in a written contract, such as attorney-client privilege, or doctor-patient confidentiality, but more formal NDAs are commonly used in commercial settings and business relationships to bind two parties to silence on issues ranging from confidential documents to accusations of wrongdoing and resulting settlements. Very few argue that NDAs being used to protect competition or trade secrets is something to be stopped, but controversy arises when victims of wrongdoing and the wrongdoers themselves enter an agreement to prevent the wrongdoing from being exposed. Employees are often made to sign NDAs after their dismissal following unacceptable practices, discrimination, or harassment, and may be paid compensation in return. While NDAs cannot be enforced in the UK and other countries if the contracted activities are criminal, they may s...

The other day I was scrolling through Instagram when I saw a meme about how Roald Dahl's character, Willy Wonka, was never held accountable for how 80% of the children who visited his factory ended up injured. It got me thinking... could the children, or their parents, sue Willy Wonka under the tort law of negligence and, more specifically, occupiers' liability? Of course, all rights are reserved to Roald Dahl and the respective parties for the film adaptations. Here, we will be referencing the Tim Burton adaptation solely, as this was all I had to hand when researching this blog post. Firstly, the law of occupiers' liability comes under two statutes: the Occupiers' Liability Acts of 1957 and 1984 - the former governs visitors, and the latter governs trespassers. For the purposes of this area of law, an 'occupier' refers to someone who has "a sufficient degree of control over the premises," according to Lord Denning in Wheat v Lacon. It is undeniab...

Hill v Chief Constable of West Yorkshire [1988] 1 AC 53 was a landmark case in establishing limits on third party liability for tortious negligence. The estate of Hill, the final victim of Peter Sutcliffe (better known as the Yorkshire Ripper), sued the Chief Constable of West Yorkshire police, claiming that their failure to apprehend the killer sooner negligently caused her death. Anyone with some knowledge of the Yorkshire Ripper case is aware of the disastrous investigation led by the police, which failed time-and-time-again to catch Sutcliffe, who they had interviewed nine times in connection with the murders. The 1982 Byford report heavily criticised the police for what was, at the time, the largest manhunt in British history – they had focussed too heavily on hoax confessional tapes and letters (against the advice of experts and victims alike) and their poor filing system meant that officers were left underprepared and key connections were not made linking evidence to Sutcl...