Personal injury compensation news
07/12/2007
Canadian lawyers may show way for UK

Canadian magazine The Lawyers Weekly has just carried an article touching on the effect of ethnicity and culture on personal injury compensation claims.

The author, a professor of law at the University of Windsor, outlines two cases where cultural values increased the value of personal injury compensation awarded. In one, a Korean teenager's facial disfigurement was successfully shown to cause shame in that culture, and in another, a woman successfully claimed increased medical negligence damages, claiming that the sterilisation performed upon her would have greater significance in the Somali Muslim culture she identified with.

However, the author also outlines the problems of stereotyping that this approach may lead to, and suggests that some defendants may begin to use this concept to try to diminish personal injury compensation payments on the grounds that certain cultures have poor employment prospects.

As the article closes with a plea for proof and understanding, this may suggest that personal injury compensation solicitors in a multicultural country like the UK will soon have similar issues to deal with.