When appraising the legal figure of the ‘reasonable person’, used by judges to evaluate the behaviour of persons before them, much of the past focus has been on reasonable. Now Valentin Jeutner (Law PhD 2012) has written a new biography of the ‘person’.
“Most of the existing scholarship has focused on the attribute of reasonableness,” Valentin says. “I think that is a mistake. I say the most important part is the person part. It humanises the standard and compels us to imagine the person in that situation making that judgement call rather than relating to an abstract notion of reasonableness.”
Valentin, a Tapp scholar at ²ʿ & Caius when his PhD focused on theory of international law and the question of dilemmas, is originally from Germany, attended secondary school in Wales and, following a postdoctoral role at the University of Oxford now lives in Sweden, where he is an .
“It's a little bit curious that a German working in Sweden and does international law writes about a quintessentially English common law figure,” Valentin adds. “But I think maybe it needed someone who has an external perspective. I’ve been trained in common law and I came across this idea of a reasonable person and it intrigued me. Germany doesn’t have that figure in the same way, for example.
“It intrigued me as a concept because it is so special and because it inspires judges, mostly, to ascribe to this imaginary figure all kinds of weird or unusual odd characteristics. At the same time, it's very important in legal practice; you apply this concept all the time as a lawyer. When you interpret contracts, when you determine if someone was negligent or when you assess the behaviour of a public authority, did they behave reasonably or not? Even in international law, when military commanders make decisions you ask ‘would a reasonable military commander have behaved in the way they did?’"
Pictured, from left to right: The Reasonable Person: A Legal Biography, by Valentin Jeutner; a portrait of Sir Edward Hall Alderson; and, Valentin Jeutner (Law PhD 2012)
Valentin adds: “The reasonable person has received a lot of bad press; most characterisations are negative. It’s been blamed for amplifying privilege or introducing biases into the law. And the concept is by no means unproblematic. But if properly understood and accurately applied it also has great potential to help us make adequate judgements. It reminds us we are humans judging other humans; imperfect beings judging other imperfect beings. There is a limit – you cannot make law completely subjective – but the reasonable person calibrates it. It helps us avoid thinking in black and white terms about good and bad people, victims and perpetrators.”
While the origins of the term come from ancient civilisations in Egypt, Rome and Greece, Valentin traces its present use to a Caian, Sir Edward Hall Alderson (Classics and Mathematics 1805), who, when passing a judgment as Baron of the Exchequer in 1856, introduced the term ‘the reasonable man’. The case was between the Birmingham Waterworks Company and Mr Blyth, who sued for damages following a burst pipe and lost.
Alderson shared traits of Scottish Enlightenment thinking with Adam Smith and David Hume, Valentin says, with the industrial revolution requiring a legal standard that allowed courts to distinguish between blameworthy negligence and ordinary accidents.
Using the reasonable person, Valentin says, means “you tap into common sense”. He adds: “You connect to people and sense what their sense of justice is. It’s an egalitarian, democratic sense of right and wrong.”
Valentin believes the concept is as relevant today as it ever has been. “It’s crucial,” he says. “I have no concern about the reasonable person not being taught, because it is omnipresent not just in England, but also in all the Commonwealth jurisdictions and jurisdictions inspired by it like the United States. But it is important to truly understand what this standard stands for and that it reminds us that the reasonable person is always someone else.”
::
