Key points are not available for this paper at this time.
This paper had its origin in the recent publication of a variety of deeply reflective perspectives upon God's activity in the world.' Though their directive force differs markedly,2 a common leitmotif is a rejection of the familiar, primitive Biblical model of divine acts according to which the God of law and justice is a God of troubles, ever at hand not afar off,3 who 'rages in the storm'4 and tests the 'perfect and upright' man with theft, pillage, fire, wind, sickness and death. Rather, contemporary theologians would say with Austin Farrer that the will of God expressed in an event is His will that 'the physical elements in the earth's crust or under it ... should go on being themselves and acting in accordance with their natures'.5 By contrast, there has been no recent analysis of the lawyer's concept of 'act of God' though linked, as it clearly is, to this discredited Biblical model. Of course, the subject is treated peripherally in most standard textbooks on Tort, in the relevant chapter on Rylands v Fletcher, but otherwise one has largely to turn to Halsbury6 and Broom's Maxims7 to discover anything more. Thus, this paper is directed to the legal concept, 'what is known to lawyers as an act of God'.8 For present purposes, Lord Esher's dictum in Pandorf v Hamilton9 that 'In the older, simpler days I have myself never had any doubt but that the phrase does not mean act of God in the ecclesiastical and Biblical sense, according to which everything is said to be an act of God; but that in a mercantile sense, it
C. G. Hall (Fri,) studied this question.