The Workmen's Compensation Acts

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: INTRODUCTION TO FIRST EDITION When the Workmen's Compensation Act was passed, it was intended to be an automatic scheme of compensation for all accidents, happening in certain defined employments, occurring to the employed during their employment, unless the accident was caused by the serious and wilful...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: INTRODUCTION TO FIRST EDITION When the Workmen's Compensation Act was passed, it was intended to be an automatic scheme of compensation for all accidents, happening in certain defined employments, occurring to the employed during their employment, unless the accident was caused by the serious and wilful misconduct of the workman injured. At one time it was seriously proposed that the assistance of lawyers should be denied to the parties to arbitration under the Act, and in no case can the applicant or respondent have the advantage of trial by jury, nor of necessity does the trial take place before a judicial functionary. The arbitration, as it is called, may indeed take place before any layman, though in practice the bulk of disputed cases seems to have been brought into the County Court?a Court which seems to possess in a peculiar degree the confidence of both applicants and respondents. The curious form of the Act of Parliament; the confusion among lawyers and legislators between the English common-law principle of liability for negligence, and the German stateinsurance principle of compensation for accident paid to the injured as one of the working expenses of the industry; and the judicial conservatism that has discovered in the Act a modified defence of contributory negligence;?these things have destroyed the Parliamentary idea of an automatic scheme of compensation, and left a mere litigating machine dear to lawyers and dearer to their clients. Thus there is a natural, and, under the circumstances, useful multiplication of legal literature about Workmen's Compensation; new books and new editions of existing books are a necessity, and any book which assists master, workman, or arbitrator to understand his legal position is assured of a welcome. To appreciate the utte...