Janvier v Sweeney
Open-knowledge reference entry
Janvier v Sweeney [1919] 2 KB 316 is a decision by the English Court of Appeal which held that the defendant was liable for illness resulting from nervous shock caused by false words and threats.
Facts
A private detective told a woman that he was a police detective and that she was wanted for communicating with a German spy. He did this in order to obtain certain information about her employer. The woman suffered shock and nervous illness as a result of this statement.
Judgment
Applying the rule in Wilkinson v Downton, the court ruled that the detective was liable for the nervous shock to the plaintiff, who had an even stronger case than in Wilkinson v Downton, since there was a clear intention to frighten the victim in order to unlawfully obtain information.
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This entry incorporates text from “Janvier v Sweeney” 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.