Hughes v Lord Advocate
UK legal case
Hughes v Lord Advocate [1963] UKHL 8 is an important Scottish delict case decided by the House of Lords on causation. The case is also influential in negligence in the English law of tort (even though English law does not recognise "allurement" per se).
The case's main significance is that, after the shift within the common law of negligence from strict liability to a reasonable standard of care, this case advocated a middle way, namely:
Even if the loss or harm is not itself foreseeable, liability may arise provided the actual loss falls with a "foreseeable class of harm".
This idea was neither developed nor expanded upon, and only one year later the claimant in Doughty v Turner Manufacturing obtained no remedy via this "middle way". However, the case was followed in subsequent cases on occupiers' liability.
Facts
One evening in November 1958, two boys aged 8 and 10 were walking down Russell Road, Edinburgh where some Post Office workers were repairing cables under the street. The men had opened a manhole and had erected a weather tent over it, with an access ladder inside. From mid-afternoon onwards, the tent had four red paraffin warning lamps. The workmen left around 5pm for a tea break nearby; before leaving, they withdrew the ladder, leaving it outside the tent.
While the workmen were out, the boys arrived and started meddling with the equipment.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Hughes v Lord Advocate” is uK legal case. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Hughes, Lord and Advocate, not as a finished interpretation.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 24, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q16845392. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1963 and 1958.
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This entry incorporates text from “Hughes v Lord Advocate” 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.