One of the great paradoxes about the legal profession is that lawyers are, on the one hand, among the most eloquent users of the English language while, on the other, they are perhaps its most notorious abusers. Why is it that lawyers, who may excel in communicating with a jury, seem incapable of writing an ordinary, comprehensible English sentence in a contract, deed, or will?

Torts, sometimes called delicts, are civil wrongs. To have acted tortiously, one must have breached a duty to another person, or infringed some pre-existing legal right. A simple example might be accidentally hitting someone with a cricket ball. Under negligence law, the most common form of tort, the injured party can make a claim against the party responsible for the injury. The principles of negligence are illustrated by Donoghue v. Stevenson. Mrs Donoghue ordered an opaque bottle of ginger beer in a café in Paisley. Having consumed half of it, she poured the remainder into a tumbler. The decomposing remains of a dead snail floated out. She fell ill and sued the manufacturer for carelessly allowing the drink to be contaminated.