This isn’t usually a very difficult question, is it? If something is proximate, it is nearby. But what about the concept in relation to tort and people who claim damages for injury as a result of what they witnessed, rather than what happened to them? This is distinctly more complicated. It’s also rather a good example of why looking up the meaning of a word in an essay title in a normal dictionary isn’t necessarily that helpful.

The law in relation to their party claims is frankly getting a bit complicated and it’s probably a good thing that a couple of cases are off to the Court of Appeal – probably to be heard together. It’s seems pretty likely that the C of A might just be a convenient stopping off point for the Supreme Court – some clarity might be coming up soon. But where are we now?

Until last year we all thought that claims would only succeed if the claimant had been sufficiently proximate in time and space to the incident. The expectation was that the claimant needed to have witnessed the incident itself or its immediate aftermath.

In Galli-Atkinson v Seghal a woman established proximity when she came upon the scene of a car accident in which her daughter had been fatally wounded and within two hours saw her daughter’s body in the mortuary. In Taylor v A Nova Limited the claimant was less successful when she witnessed her mother’s death three weeks after an accident.

Does that seem a bit unfair to you? Well it looks as if the courts feel uncomfortable about it too. The cases off to the Court of Appeal are Paul v Royal Wolverhampton [2020] and Polmear v Royal Cornwall [2021]. In Paul (which we covered in our LLB guide last year) two sisters who witnessed their father’s fatal heart attack following a hospital’s failure to diagnose his heart condition one year earlier were able to recover. What price proximity there? Much the same position prevailed in Palmear where parents witnessed the fatal collapse of their daughter also in circumstances where the local hospital had negligently failed to diagnose her illness.

So, place your bets. How is this going to land up? You could really go to town here in a discursive essay.

Oh, and we’ll be popping Palmear into this year’s guides as part of our updating process.