Where a trial judge rejects a plaintiff's specific explanation for the origin of a workplace hazard but accepts the plaintiff's credible evidence that the hazard existed and caused injury, the judge is not necessarily precluded from finding negligence on an alternative basis, provided the alternative case was raised during the trial and the defendants had the opportunity to test it. Suvaal v Cessnock City Council is confined to cases where the plaintiff's rejected factual account is inexorably linked to the claim of negligence such that rejection of the account negates the negligence case entirely. The breadth of the plaintiff's pleaded particulars of negligence may be significant in determining whether the defendants were denied procedural fairness.
The full text is available to signed-in members, including the 16 later cases that cite this judgment.
1 of the 16 citing cases carry a classified treatment. How each court treated it is available to signed-in members.