CASE LAW COMICS: Haynes v Harwood (1935)

INTRODUCTION:
This case arose from an incident on Paradise Street, Rotherhithe, where a horse-drawn van belonging to Harwood & Co. had been left standing unattended, its horses unchained, on a street where children and other members of the public were present. Left in this state, the horses were vulnerable to being startled, and on this occasion they were indeed, reportedly as a consequence of stones thrown by mischievous children. This caused them to bolt down the street directly toward the crowd. Thomas Haynes, a police constable who happened to be on duty nearby, saw the danger posed to the people in the horses’ path and stepped in to bring them under control before anyone could be injured. He succeeded, but not without cost as he was seriously injured in the process. He later brought a claim against Harwood & Co., the owner of the horses and van, for the harm he had suffered.
THE CASE:
The King’s Bench Division of the High Court of England ruled in his favour. The defendants, it held, had been negligent in allowing their horses to stand unsecured in a crowded public street, and this negligence made the resulting danger to bystanders entirely foreseeable. Haynes was awarded compensation. Harwood & Co. was not satisfied with this result and took the matter to the Court of Appeal.
ARGUMENTS ADVANCED BY THE PARTIES:
Two arguments were put forward on appeal. The first was that Haynes’ own decision to intervene should be treated as a novus actus interveniens, which was a new and independent act breaking the causal chain that ran from the defendants’ negligence to his injury. On this view, it was his choice to run toward the horses, not their initial carelessness, that ought to be regarded as the operative cause of his harm. The second argument rested on the doctrine of volenti non fit injuria or consent wherein he knowingly placed himself in the dangerous position, Haynes had, so the argument went, consented to whatever risk of injury followed. This line of reasoning found some support in Cutler v. United Dairies, an earlier case in which a defense of consent had succeeded against a rescuer in broadly similar circumstances.
FINAL JUDGEMENT:
Neither argument persuaded the Court of Appeal, and the original judgment was upheld. On causation, the court took the view that a police officer moving to stop runaway horses heading toward a crowd was not some unrelated or unforeseeable event. It was, if anything, exactly what one would expect to happen once the horses had been allowed to get loose. The chain of causation, in other words, remained intact.
It was on the second point that the case left its more lasting mark on the law. Lord Justice Greer held that consent, as a defense, has no application to a rescuer acting under the pressure of an emergency to save life; such conduct, born of necessity rather than free choice, cannot be treated as a voluntary acceptance of risk in any meaningful legal sense. This reasoning is often distilled into a single phrase associated with the judgment, “Danger invites rescue’. Where the foreseeable result of someone’s negligence is that another person will attempt to intervene, the negligent party cannot then turn around and claim that the rescuer brought any resulting injury upon themselves.
CORE LEGAL PRINCIPLE FORMULATED:
Haynes v. Harwood has endured as a leading authority in tort law for precisely this reason. It carved out rescue cases as an exception to the consent defense, and in doing so ensured that those who act, often instinctively, to protect others from harm are not left without a remedy simply because they chose to help.