Introduction

The editor of this publication has invited two of the claimants' advocates instructed in an important case presenting both comparative law and Community law questions to describe how the case came to judicial attention, and the legal and factual challenges presented by arguing broad principle-driven doctrines before an English court during a trial lasting forty-nine court days. We represented 112 individuals who were infected with hepatitis C as a result of blood transfusions in England. This chapter, written with the consent of the claimants' solicitors, is extended with a postscript by counsel for the defendant and completed by an afterword from the trial judge. The claimants were successful, but it was a ‘close-run thing’.

The problem of contaminated blood transfusions is not new to medicine or to litigation, especially in the United States. The United Kingdom avoided the excesses of the United States by having a non-commercial blood-bank system. The claimants had certainly been injured but it was questionable whether they had a good cause of action under conventional negligence principles. It is intrinsically difficult to establish liability on the part of a public authority performing a valuable public service. A case based on negligence would need to demonstrate considerable levels of breach of duty.

This is an extraordinary book, in which I am honoured to be included, and which I am even more privileged to be able to introduce. It contains contributions from an array of the leading thinkers in the field of product liability; and it provides substantial food (non-standard, and certainly not defective) for thought for practitioners, academics and students alike. The British Institute of International and Comparative Law has been in the forefront of debate in the field of product liability, organising conferences from which no self-respecting practitioner or academic in the area could afford to be absent, and now, after ‘rounding-up all the usual suspects’, producing this totally riveting book.

As the judge in the Hepatitis C litigation, I had the opportunity of climbing a steep learning curve, supervised by Counsel, but educated by leading academics not only from the United Kingdom, but from Europe and of course Australia. Now they are all collected together in one place. They may not agree (either with each other, or – even! – with the Hepatitis C judgment) but, taken together, their views constitute the corpus of present thinking, and it makes a stimulating and enlightening read.