Complex Rules & Inconsistent Interpretation : Duty of Care and Causation in Collision Sports

Developing skill levels, greater emphasis on player safety and the invasive impact of technology have all helped usher in progressively complex rule amendments to many sports – which has made the adjudication of those sports also increasingly complicated. While a complete rewrite of the rule book may not be the answer, it is clear that the rules under which many sports now operate have become quite convoluted – suffering from numerous ad hoc add-ons and intricate amendments at the expense of simplicity and clarity. This is particularly true of the so-called collision sports, where quite appropriately, the sport's governing bodies have instituted ever greater protections within the rules to try and increase the levels of safety of the participants. When such rules are poorly construed or misinterpreted however, the integrity of the sport is damaged – an impact that is magnified when the safety rules are inconsistently applied.Using incidents from the just concluded Rugby Championship, this paper will utilise a fault based, breach of duty of care reasoning “borrowed” from the tort of negligence to argue that while entirely well-intentioned, game ‘safety' rules cannot all be enforced as absolute liability offences. Unless an absence of fault rationale is properly implemented, thereby permitting breaches of some safety rules to be adjudged as strict liability offences, the coherence and welfare objectives of those rules is compromised. Furthermore, the long-term viability of collision sports becomes questionable