The Enduring Legacy of ‘Reckless Disregard’

Abstract

Personal injury at common law has spawned many cases where sports participants have inflicted injury either upon other participants or upon spectators/bystanders. This paper is not an exhaustive analysis of those ‘sports torts' cases but focuses instead upon the impact of Wooldridge v Sumner, a Court of Appeal decision that was legally sound but based upon highly significant errors of fact, and which has subsequently been advanced before the courts in two jurisdictions as authority for untenable propositions that concern both the standard of care and the duty of care owed by sports participants. While a consideration of the authorities prior to Wooldridge illustrates that there was never a basis at common law for the argument that either the standard or the duty of care differed from that pertaining in non-sporting contexts, the case has been appropriated by counsel in order to argue along those lines even though Wooldridge is not authority for either proposition. On some occasions those arguments have actually received the support of the courts of England and Wales and of the Canadian Province of British Columbia. Despite the existence in both jurisdictions of more recent authorities that ought to have heralded the demise of both concepts, they have proved remarkably tenacious.