Civil Liability (Contribution) Act 1978
Public General Act of Parliament of the United Kingdom
The Civil Liability (Contribution) Act 1978 (c. 47) is an act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom.
The act repealed the relevant common law and made new provision for contribution between persons who are jointly or severally, or both jointly and severally, liable for the same damage and in certain other similar cases where two or more persons have paid or may be required to pay compensation for the same damage; and to amend the law relating to proceedings against persons jointly liable for the same debt or jointly or severally, or both jointly and severally, liable for the same damage.
The core principle of the act is set out in section 1(1):
Subject to the following provisions ... any person liable in respect of any damage suffered by another person may recover contribution from any other person liable in respect of the same damage (whether jointly with him or otherwise).
Background
Before the 1930s, a common law rule existed forbidding claims of contribution between joint tortfeasors, albeit with some exceptions to the general rule. In 1934, the Law Revision Committee argued for altering the common law rule to allow for claims of contribution between tortfeasors. Parliament enacted the Law Reform (Married Women and Tortfeasors) Act 1935 (and amended Northern Irish law to the same extent through the Law Reform (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act (Northern Ireland) 1937) in response to these recommendations.
In the 1957 case of McConnell v Lynch-Robinson, an owner of a house sued an architect over defects. The architect sought to have the building contractor added as a party over his contribution to the damage.
“Civil Liability (Contribution) Act 1978” enters the record as public General Act of Parliament of the United Kingdom. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Civil, Liability and Contribution can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Civil Liability (Contribution) Act 1978” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Civil, Liability and Contribution provides the most credible route into that argument.
Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 10, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q100162025. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1978, 1934, 1935 and 1937.
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This entry incorporates text from “Civil Liability (Contribution) Act 1978” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.