Battery

'When practising fails to make perfect: Medical treatment and battery' by JA Devereux in (2013) 21(3) The Tort Law Review 120 comments that

The advent of the Civil Liability Acts has caused a re-examination of the utility of the battery action. No cause of action in battery can proceed where a patient has given consent to "the nature of the treatment", but there is considerable uncertainty as to exactly what this amounts to. Nowhere is this uncertainty more obvious than in the situation where the person providing the treatment is not a medical practitioner or, if he or she is, where the practitioner provides treatment not for a medical purpose but for some other reason. This article reviews the case law and suggests that its apparent contradictions can be reconciled, but only by redefining the focus of battery.