From the Editor’s Desk
8th August 2023

A tort is a civil wrong. To understand a tort, we should differentiate it from a crime. A crime is a wrong committed against the state, and when someone commits a crime, the Public Prosecutor will prosecute that person. However, when someone commits a tort, they could be sued by a private party – the state is not involved. It is possible for one action to be both a tort and a crime.

This article will explore the relationship between Mathematics and Tort Law, to show that even lawyers require an understanding of Mathematics during their work. One area where Mathematics is relevant is the computation of damages – the payment the aggrieved party is owed for the wrong committed against him.

To give you, the reader, a better understanding of a tort, let’s suppose that A has a wild, fierce dog chained up to the gate of his house. However, A fails to take reasonable care to restrain the dog, and the unsuspecting mailman comes to deliver the mail and gets mauled, sustaining injuries which prevent him from working as a mailman ever again. The mailman sues A for failing to exercise reasonable care in preventing his wild dog from escaping and hurting him for damages – and A must pay money to the mailman as compensation for his injuries.

Mathematics comes into play in quantifying the damages involved. How should the court go about calculating the damages owed to the mailman by A? One way is to look at the position the mailman would have been in, had the injury not happened. A would thus have to pay for the mailman’s medical bills and all expenses incurred since the dog bit him.

The mailman could also argue that he would lose his future earnings due to the tort. As such, the mailman’s streams of income are evaluated, and an estimate is given as to how long the mailman would have been working those jobs. The concept of extrapolation comes into play, as the court would have to evaluate and make an educated guess as to how much the mailman would suffer in future to calculate how much money A should pay him as compensation.

Another area of tort law which involves mathematics is Loss of Chance, which revolves around the tort of negligence. If the claimant can show that he has suffered a loss, he is able to receive damages. Such a loss could be the loss of physical objects, or even loss of seemingly intangible items such as economic loss or the loss of genetic affinity (such as in a case where the baby born as a result of fertility treatments was not the one having the same genes as the person who donated sperm). However, in Singapore, for medical negligence cases, the courts have refused to recognize a loss of chance. For example, such a case would include a loss chance arising because of the doctor’s negligence, which prohibited a patient’s recovery.

There has been much debate in the law due to this loss of chance area, which relates to Mathematics as it involves quantifying the damages awarded to a patient. This blends the law with science and Mathematics as it requires the law to evaluate the severity of the patient’s illness, the likelihood of recovery, and the extent to which medical negligence prohibited recovery for the patient. A pure legal background will not be sufficient to determine these, and the law must rely on experts such as doctors and researchers to determine these factors. In fact, courts have relied on statistics provided by expert witnesses, and the debate revolves around how reliable these statistics are in proving their case – should they be held as gospel, or should they serve no more than a rough guideline?

As such, students should hopefully see that Mathematics and Science can be applied across many disciplines, including in a court of law.