Nuisance and the Unruly Tenant

Abstract

As claimants used to be known, prior to their rebranding by Lord Woolf. 382 liable under any of the heads maintained, namely nuisance, Rylands v. Fletcher 7 and negligence. The Rylands v. Fletcher submission was founded on A.-G. v. Corke, 8 but foundered upon the doubtfulness of the same. In that case, caravan dwellers licensed to dwell upon D's land were held to have been a dangerous``thing'', and to have``escaped'' much as did the water from Rylands' reservoir. 9 The Vice-Chancellor brushed this precedent aside, remarking that in Corke, D might just as easily have been liable as the licensor of a nuisance. He also dealt swiftly with the submissions upon negligence, holding that in the well-regulated ®eld of duties between neighbouring landowners, there was no place for Lord Atkin's rather looser concept of neighbourhood, with all the far-reaching changes in the law which would inevitably follow. 10 However, such a peremptory exclusion of negligence is surely too wide, as shown by cases such as Miller v. Jackson. 11 Nevertheless (at least in England), Rylands and nuisance retain an important role in landowners' disputes. 12 The real interest of Smith v. Scott is on the question of nuisance. Here, Pennycuick V.-C. applied the rule in Harris v. James, i.e. that a landlord is not liable for the nuisance committed by a tenant unless, exceptionally, he can be said to have authorised it. 13 This has been held to mean either express authorisation, or (at the minimum) where the nuisance is virtually certain to result from the purposes for which the property is let. 14 Pennycuick V.-C. commented that the test was authorisation and not foresight, and so although the Council knew the Scotts were likely to cause a nuisance, that knowledge was insucient when the conditions of tenancy expressly prohibited the committing of a nuisance, thus confounding any possible argument of implied authority. 15

Far Beyond ‘The Early Morning Crowing of a Farmyard Cock’: Revisiting the Place of Nuisance within Legal and Political Discourse

“…Vicarious responsibility, in this form, has developed along several different doctrinal trajectories. Yet, while in each case we might point to the 'respectable' legal principles upon which the courts have drawn (see also Morgan, 2001), my interest is in the way choice of legal principles appears to have been influenced, if not determined, by the social context.…”

“…Northampton BC v Lovatt [1998]). The court, in Smith, emphasized the fact that landlords did not control their tenants, and that to have held the council liable in nuisance or by means of a duty of care 'would have far reaching implications in relation to business as well as to residential premises' (Pennycuick V-C [1973: 322]; see also Morgan, 2001). Hussain v Lancaster CC [1999] is a more recent example of such a 'hands off' approach.…”