Res Ipsa Loquitur: Some Recent Cases in Singapore and its Future

Res ipsa loquitur applies when a plaintiff who is injured in an accident does not know the precise cause of the accident and has to rely on the occurrence of the accident itself, as an event which does not happen in the ordinary course of things without the negligence, to infer negligence on the part of the defendant. The plaintiff in such a situation is relying on circumstantial or indirect evidence to raise a prima facie case of negligence against the defendant. Used in this way, res ipsa loquitur is an ordinary rule of evidence and it is not peculiar to the tort of negligence. Recent cases in Singapore have adopted this view of the effect of res ipsa loquitur and a Supreme Court of Canada decision has recently held that the Latin phrase employed in this way is useless and confusing, and should be abandoned in the tort of negligence. However, res ipsa loquitur has been used in some older English cases as something beyond a general rule of evidence. It is a unique and a substantive rule of law that shifts the legal burden of proof from the plaintiff to the defendant. On this application of res ipsa loquitur, the plaintiff raises a prima facie case of negligence against the defendant from which a court must, at the conclusion of the case, infer negligence, unless the defendant gives a reasonable explanation to disprove the presumption of negligence against him. The defendant is prevented by this use of the doctrine as a special rule of law from exploiting his exclusive and advantageous knowledge of the exact cause of an accident to the detriment of a plaintiff. The issue that is confronted in this article is whether res ipsa loquitur should perish in Singapore as something that merely signifies an ordinary rule of evidence or survive as a unique rule of law in the tort of negligence to correct the imbalance of knowledge that arises in the appropriate cases of proof of negligence by circumstantial evidence.