The legal principle ex turpi causa non oritur actio roughly translates from the Latin as "from a dishonourable cause an action does not arise" and basically means that you shouldn't be able to sue someone if you have committed a related illegal act yourself.
That makes a lot of sense: the law is designed to protect those who have been wronged; offering those who break the law an opportunity to actually profit from their actions is counter-intuitive to everything we expect.
For a long time this rule was applied strictly. In Holman v Johnson (1775) Lord Mansfield CJ said "[n]o court will lend its aid to a man who founds his cause of action upon an immoral or an illegal act". The problem was that this sometimes produced perverse results. Take the case of Hewison v Meridian Shipping Services Pte Ltd [2002], for example, where an employee had gained their position by concealing the fact they suffered from epilepsy. When the employer later acted negligently and caused severe injury to the claimant the employee was unable to be compensated because his original lie was illegal.
The law changed significantly in Patel v Mirza [2016] when the rules were loosened up a bit and the courts were allowed to take other factors into account before simply dismissing a claim out of hand. This week's episode of the podcast considers Stoffel & Co. v Grondona [2020] and offers an opportunity to revisit this area of the law. Would the Supreme Court return to the simpler old rule or double-down on the changes in the past few years?
Listen to find out!
Episode link: http://uklawweekly.com/2020-uksc-42
iTunes link: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/uk-law-weekly/id1137316725?mt=2
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