Tort Law SQE1 practice questions

What Tort covers in SQE1

The SRA's assessment specification for assessments from 1 September 2026 lists these areas:

• Negligence: duty of care, the standard of care (general and professional) and breach, causation (single and multiple), remoteness and loss, remedies for personal injury and death, pure economic loss from negligent acts and misstatements, psychiatric harm, and employers' primary liability.
• Defences: consent (volenti non fit injuria), contributory negligence and illegality.
• Vicarious liability.
• Occupiers' liability: claims under the Occupiers' Liability Act 1957 for visitors and the 1984 Act for non-visitors, defences and exclusion of liability.
• Product liability: in negligence and under the Consumer Protection Act 1987.
• Nuisance: public and private nuisance, the rule in Rylands v Fletcher, and remedies and defences.

Trespass to the person and defamation are not on the list.

Where it sits in FLK1

Tort is examined in FLK1, in session 2 from January 2027, with Contract and the Legal System of England and Wales with Constitutional and Administrative Law and EU Law. Each session has 85 questions, grouped by subject and randomised within the session. In the SRA's 2019 blueprint Tort makes up 14 to 20 percent of FLK1.

Tort facts often reappear in session 1, where a Dispute Resolution question may ask about limitation or procedure for a negligence claim. Ethics can arise in any Tort question, for example when a solicitor acting on a claim finds a mistake of their own on the file. The law examined in January 2027 is the law in force on 11 September 2026.

Where candidates go wrong

In the SRA's annual report for 2023/24, Tort had a mean scaled score of 299, one point below the pass mark of 300. The traps that recur in our question bank are distinctions between rules that look alike.

• Who can sue in nuisance. A claim in private nuisance needs an interest in the affected land, so a family member living in the house usually cannot sue, and personal injury is not recoverable. Public nuisance has neither requirement, but the claimant must show special damage beyond that suffered by the public.
• Breach without causation. A defendant can fall below the standard of care and still escape liability if the harm would have happened anyway. Apply the but for test to the facts given, and keep the exceptions, such as the one for mesothelioma, to the cases they were made for.
• The standard of care. The standard is objective and set by the activity. A learner driver is judged as a competent driver, while a child defendant is judged by the standard of a reasonable child of the same age.
• Visitor or trespasser. Status depends on permission, and permission can be limited to part of the premises. Under the 1984 Act the occupier must know or have reasonable grounds to believe both that the danger exists and that someone may come near it.
• Vicarious liability in two stages. First the relationship: employment, or one akin to it. Then the close connection between the wrongdoing and what the person was engaged to do. An independent contractor carrying on its own business fails at the first stage.

Two further slips are common. Contributory negligence reduces damages by the claimant's share of responsibility, not the defendant's. Prescription for nuisance runs from when the activity began to affect the claimant's land, not from when it began.

How to revise Tort

Treat negligence as a sequence and use it on every problem: duty, breach, causation, remoteness, defences, then damages. The special duty areas, pure economic loss, psychiatric harm and employers' liability, are variations on the duty stage and are easier to learn once the sequence is fixed.

Learn the statutory torts from the statutes: who is an occupier and a visitor, what counts as a defect under the 1987 Act, who is a producer, and the exclusions for damage to the product itself and small property claims. Then learn nuisance and Rylands v Fletcher together, since they share claimants, defences and remedies.

Revise Tort alongside Contract, since the two share session 2 and several concepts with different tests. The guide on how to pass SQE1 sets out how subject learning turns into timed practice.